Famed World War II aviators hold final reunion

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. (AP) ? At 97, retired Lt. Col. Richard Cole can still fly and land a vintage B-25 with a wide grin and a wave out the cockpit window to amazed onlookers.

David Thatcher, 91, charms admiring World War II history buffs with detailed accounts of his part in the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, in which he earned a Silver Star.

Retired Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, 93, still gets loud laughs from crowds for his one liners about the historic bombing raid 71 years ago Thursday that helped to boost a wounded nation's morale in the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Cole, Thatcher and Saylor ? three of the four surviving crew members from the history-making bombing run ? are at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle for a final public reunion of the Doolittle Raiders. They decided to meet at Eglin because it is where they trained for their top-secret mission in the winter of 1942, just weeks after the Japanese devastated the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The fourth surviving raider, 93-year-old Robert Hite, could not make the event.

"At the time of the raid, you know the war was on and it was just a mission we went on, we were lucky enough to survive it but it didn't seem like that big of a deal at the time. I spent the rest of the war in Europe and with the guys in Normandy and taking bodies out of airplanes and stuff and I didn't feel like a hero," Saylor said Wednesday following a ceremony in which an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter maintenance hangar at the base was named in his honor.

Saylor joked with the audience of young airmen and local dignitaries.

"My reaction when I out found out we were bombing Japan from an aircraft carrier was that it was too far to swim back home so we might as well go ahead with it," he said.

The 16 planes, loaded with one-ton bombs, took off from the aircraft carrier on less than 500 feet of runway. They had only enough fuel to drop their bombs and try to land in China with the hope that the Chinese would help them to safety.

"We were all pretty upbeat about it, we didn't have any bad thoughts about what was going to happen. We just did what we had to do," said Cole, who was Doolittle's co-pilot.

Wednesday's event at the base is part of a weeklong series of activities planned by the military and community leaders to honor the men.

Thomas Casey, business manager for the Raiders and a longtime fan of the men, said the four survivors have decided they can no longer keep up with the demands of group public appearances.

"The mission ends here in Fort Walton Beach on Saturday night, but their legacy starts then," he said.

Casey said he hopes everyone who has had a chance to interact with the men will keep their legacy alive. "I want them to tell the story to their children, their grandchildren, their neighbors and keep their story going because their story is worthwhile telling."

At each reunion is a case containing 80 silver goblets with the name of each raider inscribed right-side up and upside down on a single goblet. The men toast their fallen comrades each year and turn their goblets upside down in their honor.

They have also saved a bottle of Hennessy cognac from 1896, the year mission commander James Doolittle was born. The Raiders had said the final two survivors would open the bottle, but they have since decided that the four survivors will meet in private later this year for the toast.

At Thursday's dedication of the Saylor Hangar, the three men posed for pictures beneath a vintage B-25 bomber and an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that sat beside it.

Col. Andrew Toth, commander of the F-35 squadron at Eglin, told the men, "You boosted the morale of this nation just four months after Pearl Harbor. Thank you for your dedication service."

Young airmen and women got the old veterans' autographs and thanked them for their service.

"I've seen the movies, you know 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.' I think this is awesome because they actually trained here at Eglin and they did the ceremony to actually name a hangar after one of the guys, it's pretty cool," said Air Force Lt. Col. Mike Matesick.

Larry Kelley owns the vintage B-25 aircraft that Cole flew a day earlier during a demonstration of four restored B-25s from the World War II era.

Kelley choked up when trying to explain what it has meant to him to meet Cole and the other raiders over the last several years and to have the men fly in his aircraft.

"Here are some of the most famous aviators that came out of World War II and they've never put a nickel in their pocket for notoriety," he said. Instead, he said, any money from book signings and appearances has always gone to the James H. Doolittle Scholarship Fund for aviation students.

Kelley said sitting beside Cole while Cole took the controls of the B-25 and landed the aircraft was a highlight of his life as a World War II and aviation buff.

"Oh yeah, he did most of the flying today. He did the landing. He's dead on. I kept looking over the altimeter. I told him to hold 1,500 feet and I kept looking at the altimeter and it was dead on, not 1,499 feet, not 1,501 feet, he had it the altimeter pegged 1,500 feet," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/famed-world-war-ii-aviators-hold-final-reunion-083007724.html

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New insight into accelerating summer ice melt on the Antarctic Peninsula

Monday, April 15, 2013

A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers.

The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and to make more accurate projections about the direct and indirect contribution of Antarctica's ice shelves and glaciers to global sea level rise.

In 2008 a UK-French science team drilled a 364-metre long ice core from James Ross Island, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, to measure past temperatures in the area. They discovered that this ice core could also give a unique and unexpected insight into ice melt in the region.

Visible layers in the ice core indicated periods when summer snow on the ice cap thawed and then refroze. By measuring the thickness of these melt layers the scientists were able to examine how the history of melting compared with changes in temperature at the ice core site over the last 1000-years.

Lead author Dr Nerilie Abram of The Australian National University and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says,

"We found that the coolest conditions on the Antarctic Peninsula and the lowest amount of summer melt occurred around 600 years ago. At that time temperatures were around 1.6?C lower than those recorded in the late 20th Century and the amount of annual snowfall that melted and refroze was about 0.5%. Today, we see almost ten times as much (5%) of the annual snowfall melting each year.

"Summer melting at the ice core site today is now at a level that is higher than at any other time over the last 1000 years. And whilst temperatures at this site increased gradually in phases over many hundreds of years, most of the intensification of melting has happened since the mid-20th century."

This is the first time it has been demonstrated that levels of ice melt on the Antarctic Peninsula have been particularly sensitive to increasing temperature during the 20th Century.

Dr Abram explains,

"What that means is that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt."

Dr Robert Mulvaney from the British Antarctic Survey led the ice core drilling expedition and co-authored the paper. He says,

"Having a record of previous melt intensity for the Peninsula is particularly important because of the glacier retreat and ice shelf loss we are now seeing in the area. Summer ice melt is a key process that is thought to have weakened ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula leading to a succession of dramatic collapses, as well as speeding up glacier ice loss across the region over the last 50 years."

In other parts of Antarctica, such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the picture is more complex and it is not yet clear that the levels of recent ice melt and glacier loss are exceptional or caused by human-driven climate changes.

Dr Abram concludes,

"This new ice core record shows that even small changes in temperature can result in large increases in the amount of melting in places where summer temperatures are near to 0?C, such as along the Antarctic Peninsula, and this has important implications for ice instability and sea level rise in a warming climate."

###

British Antarctic Survey: http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk

Thanks to British Antarctic Survey for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127739/New_insight_into_accelerating_summer_ice_melt_on_the_Antarctic_Peninsula

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Coachella 2013: R. Kelly Ignites Phoenix Set, 2 Chainz And Pusha T Rep Rap

Amid Daft Punk rumors, R. Kelly joins French band for a mash-up of '1901' and 'Ignition (Remix).'
By Mary J. DiMeglio

Phoenix's Laurent Brancowitz and R. Kelly at Coachella on Saturday
Photo: Denis O'regan

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1705611/coachella-saturday-2-chainz-pusha-t-phoenix-r-kelly.jhtml

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Steep Apple, Samsung price cuts blast rivals across the globe

Smartphones

A string of recent iPhone and Galaxy price cuts has rocked the phone markets from Europe to Brazil to India. This is the season for price cuts from Apple (AAPL) and Samsung (005930), and we see the same thing every year. But this time around, the cuts are more severe than we have ever seen before. Some pricing on Galaxy S models in Asia have dropped by nearly 50% as Samsung battles back against the insurgency of upstart brands like Micromax and Karbonn. The Galaxy S III?s price in Europe has plunged by nearly 40% from June 2012 as Samsung prepares to debut the Galaxy S4. Apple?s iPhone 4 has dipped to just $270 in Brazil. In India, Apple now offers to pay 7,000 rupees?for old smartphones from consumers who trade them in towards an iPhone 4 ? probably the most aggressive promotion Apple has ever launched over there.

[More from BGR: Google Fiber has cost less than $100 million to launch so far]

The impact of these moves is already becoming evident in Europe. The widely followed USwitch smartphone sales tracker now shows five Samsung models and three Apple models in the U.K.?s top-10 chart. Discounted models from the two giants have knocked out all of BlackBerry (BBRY), LG (066570) and Nokia?s (NOK) handsets, which still showed up in the January-February charts. Back in January, no fewer than four Nokia models made the top-10 list.

[More from BGR: Apple?s vision of a tablet-laptop hybrid finally comes into focus]

In the spring of 2012, both Samsung and Apple were still enjoying strong volume growth and market share gains practically across the globe. But by Christmas 2012, Apple?s global smartphone volume growth cooled to 29%, below the industry average; and Samsung?s market share had started slipping a notch in India. Both Apple and Samsung are now getting a lot more aggressive with pricing and promotions. The overall smartphone volume growth has dropped from 50%-plus in January 2012 to around 35% in Q1 2013.

The impact on smaller rivals in Q2 2013 could be profound. As relatively fresh high-end models like the Samsung Galaxy Note II suddenly drop to the medium price bracket, they put a lot of pressure on HTC (2498), LG, Nokia and BlackBerry ? brands that are trying to recover from extremely weak performances in 2012. Apple?s notable April aggression in emerging markets like India and Brazil may be a sign that it plans to get far rougher on budget rivals in 2013 than it has ever been before.

It could well be that the second quarter?this year will be one of those watershed quarters when market shares swing sharply after a period of slower change. As mobile handset vendors prepare to report their Q1 2012 numbers, it makes sense to pay particular attention to the spring guidance; the game is now changing radically from the January-March period.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/steep-apple-samsung-price-cuts-blast-rivals-across-153003084.html

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Liquid on liquid goes solid

Apr. 10, 2013 ? A Kiel based research group has discovered nano-crystals at the interface between two liquids.

Not all liquids are mixable. Researchers from the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics of Kiel University (CAU) have investigated chemical processes with atomic resolution at the interface between two such liquids and have made an exciting discovery. During an experiment carried out at Germany's largest accelerator centre DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) in Hamburg, they observed the formation of an ordered crystal of exactly five atomic layers between the two liquids, which acts as a foundation for growing even bigger crystals. The experiment was performed in cooperation with scientists from Israel, the USA, and DESY. The results have just been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They may result in new semiconductor and nano-particle production processes.

Everyone knows that oil and water do not mix. However, how the interface between two immiscible liquids behaves on an atomic scale is almost completely unknown up to now as it cannot be investigated at this level by most modern surface science methods. Solving this final piece of the puzzle is the aim of the team of Dr. Bridget Murphy and Professor Olaf Magnussen from the Physics Department at Kiel University. To do this the scientists use the brilliant X-rays at DESY's ring accelerator PETRA III. There the LISA diffracometer (Liquid Interfaces Scattering Apparatus), an instrument developed by the physicists from Kiel, deflects the highly focussed X-ray beam onto the liquid sample. "LISA was custom designed for investigating interfaces in liquids because here important chemical processes take place" explains Bridget Murphy, who was responsible for building up this instrument in the last few years.

In their latest work the researchers wanted to find out, for the first time, what exactly occurs during chemical growth at liquid interfaces. They investigated mercury in a salt solution containing fluorine, bromine and lead ions and obtained an astonishing result: although the molecules in both liquids were disordered, a nanometre thin layer, that is a ten thousandth of the width of a human hair, with crystalline order formed at their interface. "Our X-ray data show that this layer consists of an atomic layer of fluorine between two layers of lead and bromine," explains team member Annika Elsen, who just received her doctorate for this work. "Subsequently, larger crystals grow perfectly aligned on top of this nano-layer crystal."

The atomic order that develops at such disordered liquid interfaces is not only of fundamental interest for science. In fact, in the last few years, a range of chemical processes for producing materials and nano-particles has employed growth at liquid interfaces. For example, two years ago American scientists at the University of Michigan developed a similar process for manufacturing semiconductor germanium with an extremely energy efficient method from its oxide. Further developments of such processes could help to reduce the high energy costs in the production of solar cells. In order to achieve this the details of these processes, a better understanding on the atomic scale is required. The work of the Kiel scientists is a first step in this direction.

Kiel University, a research university in north Germany, has a proven international expertise in nano-science. Experiments with synchrotron radiation make an important contribution to this field. In a series of research consortia, funded by the ministry for education and research (Bundesministerium f?r Bildung und Forschung) Kiel scientists design and develop new methods and instruments.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel.

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Journal Reference:

1. A. Elsen, S. Festersen, B. Runge, C. T. Koops, B. M. Ocko, M. Deutsch, O. H. Seeck, B. M. Murphy, O. M. Magnussen. In situ X-ray studies of adlayer-induced crystal nucleation at the liquid-liquid interface. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1301800110

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/k3l2H2GSHnM/130410131135.htm

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Defense budget counts on cuts Congress rejected

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Call it the wishing and hoping defense budget.

President Barack Obama's 2014 blueprint assumes that Washington reverses the automatic budget cuts that have become a daily reality for the military. It also counts on Congress embracing the domestic base closings, increased health care fees and weapons terminations that lawmakers resoundingly rejected in recent years.

The proposal unveiled Wednesday calls for a base Pentagon budget of $526.6 billion ? $52 billion more than the $475 billion level established by the across-the-board spending cuts set in the budget agreement between Obama and congressional Republicans in August 2011.

The budget plan includes a $88.5 billion placeholder for additional war costs in Afghanistan as Obama decides on the pace of the drawdown of American combat troops next year.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-04-10-Obama%20Budget-National%20Security/id-b0115327ed4e4f41aa6155a84cc3893e

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Pick-up in UK industry signals fragile recovery

By Olesya Dmitracova and David Milliken

LONDON (Reuters) - British industry bounced back surprisingly strongly in February, pointing to a nascent economic recovery that may nonetheless need more help from the central bank to gather pace.

A 1 percent rise in industrial output from January lifted production in February slightly above its average level in the last three months of 2012, when the economy shrank.

The data, released on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics, fed into a monthly estimate of gross domestic product by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which found 0.1 percent growth in the first quarter.

The releases allay fears of two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which would tip Britain into its third recession in less than five years.

But "glimmers of hope" do not remove the need for more quantitative easing through bond purchases by the central bank, according to Paul Fisher, a Bank of England policymaker.

Fisher said the bank's Funding for Lending Scheme was improving conditions for borrowers, but the economy still needed other help until that scheme got up to full steam.

"We need some sort of background level of QE to see us through this period, particularly while FLS has its full impact for the remainder of this year," he told a newspaper.

Fisher and two other policymakers voted for 25 billion pounds of extra gilt purchases in February and March, on top of the 375 billion pounds bought so far to pump money into the economy.

The pound rose to within sight of a 1-1/2 month high against the dollar after the industrial output data spurred some cautious optimism that Britain might avoid renewed recession.

APOCALYPSE AVERTED?

February's strengthening in industry, which late last year was the main drag on the economy, was led by a 0.8 percent rise in manufacturing output, as well as by higher demand for energy during the unusually cold month.

"If the level of (industrial) production remains the same in March, then over the first quarter as a whole industrial production will have risen by 0.1 percent," said David Tinsley, economist at BNP Paribas.

"These apocalyptic stories of a negative (first-quarter GDP) print and a triple dip (into recession) are still certainly not guaranteed," he added.

Industrial output was boosted by the biggest rise in the production of electricity and gas since October, due to an average temperature during February 0.9 degrees Celsius below its long-term norm.

It is also likely that continued cold weather supported industrial activity in March, economists said.

The first official estimate of how Britain's economy fared in the first quarter will be released on April 25.

Until then, the prospect of return to recession hangs in the balance. While a survey of purchasing managers showed manufacturing activity shrinking in March, alongside a risk of weak construction output during the first quarter, there are some signs of a recovery.

A survey out on Tuesday showed that the FLS is helping Britain's housing market, with sales at their highest level in three years and prices broadly stable in March.

Resilience in the retail sector adds to optimism, as sales kept growing last month despite the cold weather.

However, ONS data also released on Tuesday showed Britain's goods trade deficit grew much more than expected in February to reach its biggest since August at 9.4 billion pounds, mainly due to sluggish exports to other European Union countries.

(Additional reporting by Kate Holton and Peter Griffiths; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/factory-rebound-energy-boost-february-industrial-output-083523223--business.html

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