Satellite's imminent fall to Earth stirs anxiety

A bus-sized, 6.5-ton, 20-year-old NASA climate satellite is falling out of orbit and likely to hit Earth some time Friday. It is impossible to say exactly where.

The chances are slim that anyone will see any of the 26 assorted pieces of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) that are expected to survive reentry into the atmosphere. The chances that someone, somewhere on the planet, will be hit by one of those chunks are 1 in 3,200.

The chance that any particular person (in other words, you) will be hit is infinitesimal: one in many trillions, according to NASA — which had noted on its website as of press time that the satellite would not be flying over North America during the anticipated re-entry period.

But the days leading up to the craft's demise unleashed a flurry of excitement among space enthusiasts who track satellites and a welter of giddy articles about the possible risks.

FoxNews.com offered a widget that allowed readers to track the satellite's progress in real time. Paddypower.com, an Irish gambling website, began taking bets on where the debris will land. Odds of one or more of the pieces landing in Ireland were pegged at 66 to 1, for example.

A poll item on ABC News' website asked readers where they thought UARS would crash. Possible answers were "Harmlessly in the ocean," "In mountains or open plains," or "My house!" As of Wednesday afternoon, "My house!" was leading "In mountains or open plains" by a margin of 2 to 1.

Calm down, satellite watchers say. Stuff falls from the sky every day; big stuff — larger than 1,000 pounds and thus weighty enough to generate debris that falls to the ground — falls about once a week.

"It's business as usual for us here," said Maj. Michael Duncan, deputy chief of space situational awareness at the Joint Space Operations Center of U.S. Strategic Command at Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is tracking the falling satellite for NASA (along with 22,000 other, mostly man-made orbiting objects). He said that he wasn't wholly sure why this particular event was generating such intense attention.

"The UARS reentry hazard is being overhyped," said Don Kessler, a retired NASA senior scientist for orbital debris research.

NASA scientists already know a lot about how UARS, which was placed into orbit by astronauts on the shuttle Discovery in 1991 and was decommissioned in 2005, is likely to meet its end.

The satellite, which monitored ozone and other chemicals in the upper atmosphere for 14 years, is slowing because it is now traveling in low orbit, where it encounters resistance from the upper atmosphere, said NASA space debris scientist Mark Matney. As the density of the atmosphere it is passing through increases, its pieces will eventually break up, lose speed and make their fiery fall.

At press time, forecasters expected that to happen some time Friday afternoon, Eastern daylight time. .

According to NASA, the pieces that could hit Earth — made mostly of titanium, beryllium and stainless steel, and weighing as much as about 300 pounds — will be strewn across a path 500 miles long.

Matney said that the chunks, once bulkhead fittings, fuel tanks and the like, will fall as "oddly shaped pieces of metal" and may be charred or mangled. NASA has warned people not to touch items that might have fallen from UARS because they might have sharp edges, he said. No hazardous chemicals are aboard the satellite, he added.

But there is plenty the trackers don't know about the satellite's reentry — namely, where those pieces will fall — and that's what has some people spooked.

"There is no modeling that predicts where it will hit the surface of the Earth," Duncan said.

Even at two hours before impact, when predictions by the Joint Space Operations Center will be "pretty accurate" in estimating where the craft's orbit will lead, he said, that still leaves an area covering thousands of miles where the pieces could crash down. Weather and other factors could make a difference.

Kessler likens the satellite's descent to a rock skipping across water: Rather than moving predictably, a craft leaving orbit skids across the upper portion of the atmosphere. That makes it hard to know where the bits will fall until a few minutes before impact, he said.

Ted Molzcan, Toronto-based administrator of the hobbyist satellite-tracking Internet mailing list SeeSat-L, said he had hoped the craft would fall near him — but not too near. He saw Raduga 33, a Russian communications satellite, decay and tumble to Earth in 2004, and enjoyed the spectacle.

"Since UARS is fairly large, it will put on a better-than-average show," he wrote in an email. He said the satellite would "look like a surreal comet, with a brilliant head — brighter than any star — and a bright tail … something like a meteoritic fireball, but much slower moving."

UARS' crumbling fragments will glow brilliantly — perhaps enough to be seen during daylight — and will spread along the path of the decay, he added.

Mike Weaver, an aerospace engineer at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo who tracks uncontrolled objects leaving orbit and is keeping a close eye on UARS, said that the satellite may light up the sky for as long as two minutes as it makes its way across the sky.

The Chicken Little crowd worries more about getting clocked by a hunk of metal, but if the past is any predictor, that won't happen. "Most of these things fall in the water," said Bill Ailor, another aerospace engineer at the company.

The Russian space station Mir fell safely into the South Pacific in March 2001. The U.S. space station Skylab disintegrated and tumbled into the Indian Ocean and sparsely populated parts of Australia in July 1979.

In fact, over more than 50 years of space flight, just one person is confirmed to have been hit by space junk. In 1997, Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Okla., was brushed by a small bit of metal mesh believed to have come from a spent Delta II rocket.

"I think I was blessed that it doesn't weigh that much," she told NPR in an interview that aired Wednesday. "That was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me."

Williams did not respond to attempts by The Times to contact her.

The amount of stuff orbiting the Earth is growing steadily, but the threat of satellites falling from the sky may lessen in coming years, NASA's Matney said. Newer satellites are being designed for targeted reentry, or to burn up completely before they hit the ground.

Solar Blares: Listening to the Sun May Improve Space Weather Forecasts

Peering deep into the sun's churning plasma, solar physicists have discovered a way to forecast the emergence of sunspots before they reach the solar surface.

Sunspots are dark patches marking magnetically active regions that often host solar flares and violent belches called coronal mass ejections. Trimming lead times on sunspot detection would allow for better forecasts of space weather—bursts of radiation and charged particles from the sun that can cause real problems on and around Earth. Bad spells of space weather can damage power grids, endanger satellites and aircraft, and pose radiation threats to astronauts in orbit.

A group of Stanford University researchers has found that they can identify the signature of sunspots forming at depths of 60,000 kilometers or so, a full day or two before the sunspots bloom on the surface. The researchers reported their findings in the August 19 issue of Science.

"This is the first time that we have detected sunspots before they appear on the solar disk," says Stathis Ilonidis, a Stanford graduate student who co-authored the new study with physicists Junwei Zhao and Alexander Kosovichev.

Ilonidis and his colleagues plumbed the sun's inner workings with a method called time–distance helioseismology. Working from archival data from the sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft, the researchers measured how long it takes sound waves to travel from one point on the solar surface to another, some 100,000 to 200,000 kilometers away, along a refracted, or bent, path through the interior. In four locations where a sunspot was soon to emerge, acoustic waves returned to the solar surface with anomalous rapidity—more than a dozen seconds faster than normal. "At these distances, the travel time [through the sun's interior] is about one hour," Ilonidis says. "If there is a sunspot region along one of these paths, the travel time will be a little bit shorter." The emerging sunspot region seems to boost the local speed of sound, thereby hastening the refracted return of sound waves passing through that part of the solar interior.

The researchers also charted sound waves passing through nine quiet regions of the sun, where no sunspots were developing, and found no significant anomalies in the waves' travel time. By looking for sound waves propagating with anomalous speed, solar physicists going forward might be able to predict where sunspots are going to appear and provide longer lead-time forecasts back on Earth.

But Ilonidis acknowledges that more research is needed to test the predictive power of the new method. "What we need to do in the future is have more statistics, to look at more regions—both regions with sunspots and without sunspots—and check the statistics, whether we have false positives or false negatives," he says. "We need to find what is the success rate with our technique."

The strong signature of sunspots rising from the depths highlights how poorly understood is the sun's inner structure. The emerging sunspots speed up sound waves far more than had been expected; a recent analysis had predicted that sunspot regions would hasten the arrival time of sound waves by only one second or thereabouts. But Ilonidis and his colleagues found anomalies of 12 to 16 seconds for sound waves passing through a sunspot region. "That was a big surprise, because it's much higher than what we expected from the current theoretical models," he says.

What is more, the researchers found a sort of sweet spot for their soundings, a depth where the sunspot signal is strongest. But why emerging sunspots should reveal themselves clearly at one depth but not at others is a mystery. "We can detect sunspots at a depth of 60,000 kilometers, but if we try to detect them deeper or closer to the surface, the travel-time shift becomes weaker," Ilonidis says. "We don't understand why, only at a specific depth, the detection of sunspots is easier."

Solar physicist Philip Scherrer, who is also based at Stanford, notes that theoretical models of how sunspots appear are relatively successful at describing surficial solar activity but much less true to reality at depth. "So what happens deeper, how the dynamo is really generated from the interplay of rotation and convection and existing fields, isn't really understood," he says. "For all of these things you can tune up a model and make it work for a little while, but some basics are still missing."

Theoretical explanation or no, the new finding may soon afford airlines, satellite operators and other watchers of space weather advance warning of impending solar activity. "It will probably help us to make better forecasts for what the sun is going to do," Scherrer says. "Up until now we've waited until we see the magnetic field erupting."

What's the age of the moon? It could be waning

WASHINGTON (AP) — That old moon might not be as antique as we thought, some scientist think. They say it's possible that it isn't a day over 4.4 billion years old.

But other astronomers disagree with a new study's conclusions. They think the moon is up to its typical age-defying tricks and is really pushing 4.6 billion as they have suspected all these years.

Either way, the new analysis of an important moon rock brought back by the Apollo 16 mission is showing that the moon isn't ready to give up its true age and origins quite yet, even though scientists thought they had it all figured out a decade or two ago.

"It's not as ancient as we might think," said study chief author Lars Borg, a geochemist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. His study appears online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The study uses new techniques and radioactive isotopes of lead and other elements to date the moon rock at 4.4 billion years old. What's key is that this is a special type of rock that would have floated up to the moon's crust soon after its theorized ocean of molten rock cooled. That supposedly happened soon after the moon formed as a result of a spectacular crash between Earth and a planet. The chunks that broke off formed the moon.

That means there are two possibilities, Borg said. Either the moon is 200 million years younger or the accepted theory of a molten rock ocean on the moon is wrong, he said.

Borg acknowledges that some moon rocks have been dated at nearly 4.6 billion years old. But those conclusions could be wrong because of weaker rock dating techniques used in the past, he said.

Outside scientists said Borg did good work coming up with a date for the Apollo 16 rock but may have jumped to the wrong conclusion on lunar age or origins. They said it's possible that the rock is from a smaller molten rock ocean or was created when the moon was bombarded by space debris which was much more common a few billion years ago.

Borg's conclusion "is a little bit fancy for my taste," said Erik Asphaug of University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently published a theory that Earth used to have a second smaller moon until it crashed into the bigger one.

MIT astronomer Maria Zuber called the study in Nature "very puzzling."

stephen hawking | The Most Notable Stephen Hawking Achievements

Stephen Hawking is a well known name in the scientific community. He has made some astounding observations and has turned the scientific world upside down on numerous occasions. Some of the notable Stephen Hawking achievements are ones that he has earned throughout his lifetime.

Hawking was born in 1942 in the United States, but his parents were from London and he quickly returned there. After graduating from the distinguished Oxford University in 1962, he quickly became renowned in theoretical physics, applied mathematics, and cosmology. While he was attending Oxford, he lost his balance and fell down a flight of stairs. It turned out that he was suffering from ALS a crippling disease that normally claims life after only 10 years of diagnosis, but somehow Hawking seems to be defying all of the odds.

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Even though Hawking is paralyzed and unable to speak, he is still a driving force in the way science is conducted. His first notable achievement was gained in 1975 when he was awarded the Eddington Medal and this achievement is saved for those who make outstanding breakthroughs in theoretical physics. In 1979 he was also awarded the Albert Einstein Medal. When Hawking was only 32 he was named a fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1988 he won the Wolf Prize in Physics and this is one of the most highly prestigious awards you can receive after the Nobel Prize. His work and research led to this amazing nomination and win. He also wrote A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes in 1988 and this was a best seller right away. He also has written several books since and also a collaboration of children’s books that he wrote with his daughter.

In 2006 he won the Copley Medal by the Royal Society for his work this award is given to those that make outstanding achievements in the department of science. In 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and this is the highest honor a civilian can obtain in the United States. You have to complete something very significant to achieve this award.

These are the notable Stephen Hawking achievements, but there are many more that Hawking has won over his life span. It is predicted that Hawking will receive many more awards for quite some time and long after he is gone. His work in physics is astounding and many people look to him for inspiration.

“And now I would like to invite you to see more invaluable information on Stephen Hawking Books at http://www.stephenhawkingbooks.com From Craig Thornburrow – A writer, small business owner and big fan of Stephen Hawking”

Trojan asteroid seen in Earth's orbit by Wise telescope

Astronomers have detected an asteroid not far from Earth, moving in the same orbit around the Sun. The 200-300m-wide rock sits in front of our planet at a gravitational "sweet spot", and poses no danger.

Its position in the sky makes it a so-called Trojan asteroid - a type previously detected only at Jupiter, Neptune and Mars.

2010 TK7, as it is known, was found by Nasa's Wise telescope. The discovery is reported in this week's Nature journal.

It is a fascinating observation because the relative stability and proximity of Trojans would make possible targets for astronaut missions when we eventually go beyond the space station.

2010 TK7 is probably not the rock of choice, simply because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require a lot of fuel to reach it.

Nonetheless, its detection means it is highly likely there are other, more suitable Trojans out there waiting to be found.

The difficulty is the viewing geometry that puts any Trojan, from the perspective of an Earth-based telescope, in bright skies.

It took an orbiting telescope sensitive to infrared light to pick up 2010 TK7.

Wise, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer launched in 2009, examined more than 500 Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), 123 of which were new to science.

The authors of the Nature paper sifted through data on these rocks, looking for the candidates that might be Trojans.

Follow-up work on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope confirmed the status of 2010 TK7.

It traces quite a complex path at its orbital point. Currently, it is about 80 million km from Earth, and should come no closer than about 25 million km.

The team says its orbit appears stable at least for the next 10,000 years.

2010 TK7's existence should not really be a surprise. Jupiter, Neptune and Mars all have collections of rocks sitting in the so-called Lagrange points 60 degrees ahead of or behind the planets in their orbits.

In the case of Jupiter, the number of Trojans now tops 1,000 rocks.

"These objects are difficult to find from Earth, simply because they're not very big and they're pretty faint, and they're close to the Sun as seen from Earth," explained Christian Veillet from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and a co-author on the Nature study.

"But we can find them from space, and future satellites will likely find some more. We think that there are others which will be very close to the Earth and have motions that make them relatively easy to reach. So, they could be potential targets to go to with spacecraft," he told BBC News.

'First humans out of Africa once shrank to 1,000'

London: The number of descendants of the first humans leaving Africa had once reduced to barely over 1,000 before they began to expand rapidly, a study has found.

The findings have been made by genome scientist Richard Durbin and his then research assistant Heng Li at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge.

The scientists discovered the population of the ancestors of modern Asian and European people dwindled to just 1,200 who were "actively reproducing". They also found that African populations crashed to around 5,700 people, Daily Mail reported Monday.
And, contrary to popular belief, the study revealed that these early humans continued to breed with sub-Saharan Africans until as recently as 20,000 years ago.

The scientists mined the publicly available DNA sequence of American biologist Craig Venter - who was one of the first to sequence the human genome - as well as the sequences from six other people.

The duo scientists were able to learn an entire population's history by taking a person's genome.

Geneticists, interested in looking back at human history, have traditionally compared DNA sequences from numerous people around the world to determine how different populations relate to one another and when they might have gone their separate ways.

They have now discoverd that part of a person's genome - which stores hereditary information - can also be followed back in time to when just one version, a common ancestor, existed.

Where does 44 trillion watts of Earth's heat come from?

WASHINGTON: Some 44 trillion watts of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does this come from? One trillion is 1,000 billion. So 44 terawatts works out to 44,000 billion watts. And how did geologists come by the staggering figure? They relied on temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world.

Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in earth's crust and mantle is a principal source of this heat, reports the journal Nature Geoscience .

In 2005, scientists in the Japan-based KamLAND (Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector) collaboration first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly.

A neutrino, more similar to an electron, is an elementary particle that travels close to the speed of light, but unlike electrons, doesn't carry an electric charge, according to a statement by Berkeley Lab, which is a major contributor to KamLAND.

The trick was to catch what KamLAND dubbed geoneutrinos -- more precisely, geo-antineutrinos -- emitted when radioactive isotopes (same chemical element with different masses) decay.

"As a detector of geoneutrinos, KamLAND has distinct advantages," says Stuart Freedman, member of US Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab.

Freedman, also professor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "KamLAND was specifically designed to study antineutrinos. We are able to discriminate them from background noise and detect them with very high sensitivity."

One thing that's at least 97 percent certain is that radioactive decay supplies only about half the earth's heat. Other sources - primordial heat left over from the planet's formation, and possibly others as well - must account for the rest.

Antineutrinos are produced not only in the decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium isotopes but in a variety of others, including fission products in nuclear power reactors.

Astronauts awakened by second computer failure

After getting a little free time Thursday, the last space shuttle crew was awakened to deal with a second computer failure on Atlantis.

The astronauts switched to another of shuttle's five main computers, and NASA said the shuttle was in "stable condition with no concerns for the crew's safety." A computer had also failed on Sunday.

The crew had gone to bed late Thursday afternoon, but Mission Control woke them up about one and a half hours later because of the computer trouble. NASA said they would troubleshoot the problem on Friday.

Sunday's computer failure occurred just before the shuttle linked up with the International Space Station. Engineers said the problem was likely caused by a bad switch throw. That computer was working again Monday after new software was installed.

The check-and-balance network of computers provides redundancy during the most critical phases of the mission, and will be needed when Atlantis lands next week to wrap up the 30-year shuttle era.

Time off
Earlier Thursday, the crew got some time off after a hectic week to savor their historic experience.

"This is one of the first days we've been able to take a deep breath and appreciate what we're doing up here," said shuttle commander, Christopher Ferguson.
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Until Thursday, the workload in orbit was so intense that the four astronauts had only fleeting moments of realizing "wow, this is really it," astronaut Rex Walheim said in a series of TV interviews.

"But boy, it's going to hit when we land and wheels stop," he added.

Mission Control allotted plenty of time Thursday for the 10 astronauts aboard the linked Atlantis and space station to linger over the "all-American meal" of grilled chicken and barbecued beef brisket that was packed for them, complete with baked beans and Hostess apple pie. Space station resident Ron Garan tweeted that he "had a great dinner tonight."

Before kicking back and relaxing, Ferguson said the space station delivery mission was going well and that the back-and-forth cargo hauling was three-quarters completed.
"Atlantis is purring like a kitten," he said. "I think she's about 25 years or so old, but she performs just like a newborn."

Atlantis first rocketed into orbit in 1985. This is its 33rd flight and the 135th shuttle mission overall. Atlantis will join Discovery and Endeavour in retirement, following its landing next week.

Tons of supplies delivered
The space shuttle delivered nearly 5 tons of food, clothes and other household goods in a giant canister to the space station — an entire year's worth of supplies. NASA wants the orbiting lab well stocked in case private companies fall behind in their effort to take over shuttle supply runs. The first such commercial flight is expected by year's end.

While the unmanned cargo ships are smaller than NASA's shuttles, Ferguson pointed out there are many more of them, launching from all over the world. But the craft burn up in the atmosphere after they undock
"From a return standpoint, bringing things back from the space station and getting them to Earth, we're going to miss the space shuttle," he said.

Atlantis, for instance, will return more than 7,000 pounds (3,175 kilograms) of discarded equipment and trash from the space station, freeing up much-needed room. Engineers will take apart some of the broken machinery to see what went wrong and, hopefully, learn from the mistakes.

Astronaut Sandra Magnus — who spent more than four months on the space station a few years back — said she's amazed at how much bigger it is now that it's finished. She said she sometimes thinks: "Wow, look what we did. We built this huge, huge, monster laboratory orbiting the Earth, with cooperation from countries all over the world."

Three of the space station crew marked their 100th day in space Thursday: Garan and Russians Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev. They will remain on board until September.

Atlantis' trip, by comparison, is a scant 13 days. It will undock Tuesday and aim for a Florida homecoming Thursday to close out the 30-year shuttle program.

A TV broadcaster asked Ferguson if he'll make "a Neil Armstrong type statement" at touchdown. Atlantis will miss landing on the 42nd anniversary of Armstrong's "one small step for man" speech by one day; by adding a day to the mission earlier this week, NASA bumped Atlantis' homecoming to July 21.

"I put some thought into how we're going to reflect on the moment," Ferguson said, "and perhaps we'll just save that until the wheels-stop call and we'll let you know then."

Neptune completes first revolution of sun

Neptune -- the blue coloured eighth planet of the solar system, will this year complete its first revolution of the sun since its discovery in 1846. The heavenly body will celebrate its birthday on July 13 at 03:06 IST when it reaches approximately the same heliocentric longitude 329°.1020 as at
the time of its discovery, R C Kapoor of Indian Institute of Astro Physics said.

To watch the planet, see Capricornus and Aquarius constellations between the stars Delta Capricorni and Lambda Aquari to be precise, he said, adding, one needs a moderate sized telescope to view it.

Neptune will be in opposition on August 22, 2011, which means it will rise around when the sun sets in the west and shall be up all night, he said. Neptune is also the first planet found by mathematical prediction rather than by observation, C B Devgun of SPACE said.

Unexplained deviations in the orbit of the planet Uranus, ever since its accidental discovery on March 13, 1781 by William Herschel, led astronomers to believe that there was some unknown body farther out.

John Adams and Urbain Le Verrier carried out independent analysis of discrepancies in the observed and calculated positions of Uranus and predicted in 1845 the mass and orbit of the perturbing body. The planet was discovered on September 23, 1846 by Johann Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest from Berlin Observatory very near the predicted position, Devgun said. Neptune has 13 satellites, and a thin ring system that was discovered in 1984. The planet's orbit is nearly circular. It's atmosphere is dominantly hydrogen (80 per cent), with helium (19 per cent) and methane (1 per cent) , and a very small admixture of other compounds. The average temperature is – 235°C. It is 38.87 times bigger and 17.132 times more massive than the Earth.

Neptune completes first revolution of sun

E. Coli Not Found in Initial Testing of Sprouts

BERLIN — German agriculture officials said Monday that 23 of 40 produce samples from a suspected sprout farm failed to identify E. coli contamination, a finding that adds to the confusion over the source of an outbreak that has killed at least 22 people and left more than 600 in intensive care.
The announcement, made at a news conference Monday afternoon, came a day after officials had identified tainted sprouts from a farm in the Uelzen area in the north as the “most convincing” cause, and shut it down while it tested 18 sprout mixtures, including beans, broccoli, peas, chickpeas, garlic, lentils, mung beans and radishes. The sprouts are often used in mixed salads.
The results from the remaining 17 tests were expected within 24 hours.
The German authorities had acted prematurely once before in their investigation, blaming cucumbers grown in Spain for the outbreak after preliminary tests showed that they might have contained toxic E. coli bacteria. Further tests showed that the Spanish cucumbers did not contain the strain making people sick, and investigators then backtracked.
That episode infuriated Spanish farmers who lost tens of millions of dollars in sales and were forced to abandon ripe vegetables to rot in the fields, as demand collapsed.
The outbreak, which German health authorities first reported in late May, is caused by a rare strain of toxic E. coli that can cause bloody diarrhea. In extreme cases it can cause acute kidney failure and death. In previous outbreaks involving other strains of E. coli, kidney failure appeared most often among children. In this outbreak, most victims with kidney failure have been adults and more than two-thirds have been women. Cases have cropped up in at least 10 countries in Europe, but virtually all have been traced to northern Germany.
Sprouts had seemed like a likely source, and some experts were surprised that Germany had not focused on them earlier. Since 1996, sprouts have been linked to at least 30 illness outbreaks, according to a United States federal food safety Web site that warns that children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weak immune systems should not eat uncooked sprouts.
Sprouts were found to be the cause of one of the most severe series of outbreaks of E. coli ever identified, in Japan in 1996. In those outbreaks about 10,000 people, many of them children, fell ill after eating food containing uncooked radish sprouts. That involved the common O157:H7 strain of E. coli. The current outbreak in Germany involves a rare strain known as O104:H4.
Bacteria can flourish in the warm, humid conditions in which sprouts are grown, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control. Investigators have sometimes found that the seeds used to grow sprouts are contaminated with bad bacteria, like E. coli or salmonella. Once those seeds start growing, the bacteria can easily spread.
The Spanish government did not comment Sunday on the latest news in the German investigation. But mounting evidence that the problem should never have been linked to produce from Spanish farms is likely to raise pressure on Germany and the European Union to compensate Spanish farmers for estimated weekly losses of $286 million in revenue because of canceled shipments, as well as massive job cuts among seasonal growers in Andalusia.
That area, the Spanish agricultural heartland, was already suffering the worst unemployment problem in the country.

E. Coli Not Found in Initial Testing of Sprouts

Hunt Is on for Remains of Possible Mona Lisa Model

Italian researchers have announced a plan to dig up bones in a Florence convent in hopes of identifying the remains of a Renaissance woman long believed to be the model for the Mona Lisa.
The researchers hope that the project can help answer some of the enduring mysteries surrounding Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, including whether the woman, Lisa Gherardini, was indeed the model.

They launched their project in Florence Tuesday.

Project leader Silvano Vinceti said the excavations in the Convent of St. Ursula, in central Florence, are scheduled to begin at the end of April.

Lisa Gherardini was the wife of a rich silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. Tradition has long linked her to the painting, which in Italian is known as "La Gioconda.

Hunt Is on for Remains of Possible Mona Lisa Model