11 year old calls Police for forced labor

A boy of 11 called a German police emergency line to complain of "forced labour" after his mother told him to help clean the home.

Police say the boy from Aachen, who has not been identified, spoke to an officer via the 110 number.

They say he complained: "I have to work all day long. I haven't any free time."

His mother told the officer the boy had kept threatening to call them, having repeatedly complained of having to do housework during the school holidays.

A transcript of the conversation, printed in local newspapers, revealed the officer asking the boy to describe the kind of "forced labour" he was doing.

The boy replied that he had to clean the home and terrace, it said.

Asked if he knew what forced labour was, the boy said he did, and the police officer asked to speak to his mother, who at that stage was standing next to him.

She explained he had called after being asked to pick up paper from the floor, adding: "He plays all day long and when told to tidy up what he's done, he calls it forced labour."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14533749

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Itsy bitsy bar code bikini

(Reuters) - Soccer teams have home and away shirts,tennis and golf stars have clothes and gear with sponsored logos, but if you're a female beach volleyball star there's not a lot of costume real estate to hire out to the marketing folks.

That's why British beach volleyball stars Shauna Mullin and Zara Dampney will be sporting a teensy weensy high tech bar code on their itsy bitsy bikini bottoms when they compete in a high profile London tournament this week.

The Olympic pairing -- ranked 26th in the world -- will have a Quick Response (QR) code on their costumes at the Visa FIVB Beach Volleyball International, an intercontinental women's volleyballexhibition.

When photographed on a smartphone, the QR matrix barcode directs users straight to a specific website, in this case a site owned by online sports betting company Betfair.

The barcode, part of a sponsorship deal with Betfair, will be printed on the back of the bikini bottoms, where advertisers think it will attract the most attention.

"There is huge interest in beach volleyball and we want to ensure that our advertising campaign is seen and remembered by as many sports fans as possible," Betfair's Andy Lulham said in a statement.

"As far as we're aware this is the first time QR codes have been used in in-play sports advertising and what better way to test its effectiveness than by putting them on one of the places that is likely to get photographed the most."

The tournament, which is part of the official 2012 London Olympic Games sports testing programme, takes place in Horse Guards Parade, London, the ceremonial grounds which hosts the Trooping of the Colour each year on the Queen's birthday.

This venue will host the 2012 London Olympic Games beach volleyball tournament in a temporary arena which will be built next year and have a capacity of 15,000.

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Earth in Antimatter Belt?

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) - launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System - so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth's atmosphere, creating showers of particles.

Many of the cosmic ray particles or these "daughter" particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth's magnetic field traps them.

Among Pamela's goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

'Abundant source'

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.

The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place - at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they "annihiliate" in a flash of light.

The band is "the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth", said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.

"Trapped antiprotons can be lost in the interactions with atmospheric constituents, especially at low altitudes where the annihilation becomes the main loss mechanism," he told BBC News.

"Above altitudes of several hundred kilometres, the loss rate is significantly lower, allowing a large supply of antiprotons to be produced."

Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft - an idea explored in a report for Nasa's Institute for Advanced Concepts.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122

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Flowing Water on Mars?

The dark 'tendrils', emerging from rocky Martian outcrops, are signs of flowing water, say Scientists

Striking new images from the mountains of Mars may be the best evidence yet of flowing, liquid water, an essential ingredient for life.

The findings, reported today in the journal Science, come from a joint US-Swiss study.

A sequence of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show many long, dark "tendrils" a few metres wide.

They emerge between rocky outcrops and flow hundreds of metres down steep slopes towards the plains below.

They appear on hillsides warmed by the summer sun, flow around obstacles and sometimes split or merge, but when winter returns, the tendrils fade away.

This suggests that they are made of thawing mud, say the researchers.

"It's hard to imagine they are formed by anything other than fluid seeping down slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but they appear when it's still too cold for fresh water.

Salty water

"The best explanation we have for these observations so far is flow of briny water, although this study does not prove that," said planetary geologist and lead author Professor Alfred McEwen of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona.

Saltiness lowers the temperature at which water freezes, and water about as salty as Earth's oceans could exist at these sites in summer.

"This could be the first flowing water," said Professor McEwen. This has profound implications in the search for extraterrestrial life.

"Liquid water is absolutely essential for life, and we've found life on Earth in pretty much every moist niche," said Dr Lewis Dartnell, astrobiologist at University College London, who was not involved in the study.

"So perhaps there could be hardy microbes surviving in these short periods of summer meltwater on the desert surface of Mars."

This was echoed by an expert on life in extreme environments, Professor Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland, also not involved in this study: "Their results are consistent with the presence of large and extensive underground salty lakes on Mars."

"This is an exciting possibility for those of us studying salt-loving (halophilic) micro-organisms here on Earth, since it opens the possibility that these kinds of hearty bugs may also inhabit our neighbouring planet," he said.

"Halophilic microbes are champions at withstanding the most punishing conditions, complete desiccation and ionising (space) radiation."

For geologist Joe Levy of Portland State University, a specialist in Antarctic desert ecosystems, who did not contribute to this work, they represent "a truly tantalising astrobiological target".

These small and mysterious tendrils could then be the best place to look for Martian life. Professor McEwen says that "for present-day life, these are the most accessible sites".

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14408928

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Multiverses in 'bubbles'?

The idea that other universes - as well as our own - lie within "bubbles" of space and time has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these "bubble universes" may have left marks on our own.

This "multiverse" idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.

The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.

For now, the team has worked with seven years' worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint glow left from our Universe's formation.

'Mind-blowing'

The theory that invokes these bubble universes - a theory formally called "eternal inflation" - holds that such universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding - meaning that they are forever out of reach of one another.

But Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.

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It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe”

George EfstathiouUniversity of Cambridge

"I'd heard about this 'multiverse' for years and years, and I never took it seriously because I thought it's not testable," Dr Peiris told BBC News. "I was just amazed by the idea that you can test for all these other universes out there - it's just mind-blowing."

Dr Peiris' team first proposed these disc-shaped signatures in the CMB in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and the new work fleshes out the idea, putting numbers to how many bubble universes we may be able to see now.

Crucially, they used a computer program that looked for these discs automatically - reducing the chance that one of the collaborators would see the expected shape in the data when it was not in fact there.

The program found four particular areas that look likely to be signatures of the bubble universes - where the bubbles were 10 times more likely than the standard theory to explain the variations that the team saw in the CMB.

However, Dr Peiris stressed that the four regions were "not at a high statistical significance" - that more data would be needed to be assured of the existence of the "multiverse".

"Finding just four patches is not necessarily going to give you a good probability on the full sky," she explained to BBC News. "That's not statistically strong enough to either rule it out or to say that there is a collision."

Dr Peiris said that data from the Planck telescope - a next-generation space telescope designed to study the CMB with far greater sensitivity - would put the idea on a firmer footing, or refute it. However, the data from Planck cannot be discussed publicly before January 2013.

George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, called the work "the first serious attempt to search for something like this... from the methodology point of view it's interesting".

He noted that the theories that invoked the multiverse were fraught with problems, because they dealt in so many intangible or immeasurable quantities.

"My own personal view is that it will need new physics to solve this problem," he told BBC News. "But just because there are profound theory difficulties doesn't mean one shouldn't take the picture seriously."

Dr Peiris said that even if these bubble universes were confirmed, we could never learn anything further about them.

"It would be wonderful to be able to go outside our bubble, but it's not going to be possible," she explained.

"They're born close together - that's when the collision happens - and this same inflation happens between the bubbles. They're being hurled apart and space-time is expanding faster than light between them."

But Professor Efstathiou said the search was inherently worth it. He explained: "It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe. It's a long shot, but it would by very profound for physics."

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