Pluto Now Called a Plutoid

From Yahoo! News

The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term "plutoid" as a name for dwarf planets like Pluto.

Sidestepping concerns of many astronomers worldwide, the IAU's decision, at a meeting of its Executive Committee in Oslo, comes almost two years after it stripped Pluto of its planethood and introduced the term "dwarf planets" for Pluto and other small round objects that often travel highly elliptical paths around the sun in the far reaches of the solar system.

The name plutoid was proposed by the members of the IAU Committee on Small Body Nomenclature (CSBN), accepted by the Board of Division III and by the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN), and approved by the IAU Executive Committee at its recent meeting in Oslo, according to a statement released today.

Here's the official new definition:

"Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit."

In short: small round things beyond Neptune that orbit the sun and have lots of rocky neighbors.

The two known and named plutoids are Pluto and Eris, the IAU stated. The organization expects more plutoids will be found.

Controversy continues

Already the IAU recognizes it is adding to an ongoing controversy.

The IAU has been responsible for naming planetary bodies and their satellites since the early 1900s. Its decision in 2006 to demote Pluto was highly controversial, with some astronomers saying simply that they would not heed it and questioning the IAU's validity as a governing body.

"The IAU is a democratic organization, thus open to comments and criticism of any kind," IAU General Secretary Karel A. van der Hucht told SPACE.com by email today. "Given the history of the issue, we will probably never reach a complete consensus."

It remains to be seen whether astronomers will use the new term.

"My guess is that no one is going to much use this term, though perhaps I'm wrong," said Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, who has led the discovery of several objects in the outer solar system, including Eris. "But I don't think that this will be because it is controversial, just not particularly necessary."

Brown was unaware of the new definition until the IAU announced it today.

"Back when the term 'pluton' was nixed they said they would come up with another one," Brown said. "So I guess they finally did."

More debate coming

The dwarf planet Ceres is not a plutoid as it is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to the IAU. Current scientific knowledge lends credence to the belief that Ceres is the only object of its kind, the IAU stated. Therefore, a separate category of Ceres-like dwarf planets will not be proposed at this time, the reasoning goes.

A meeting, planned earlier this year for Aug. 14-16 at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, aims to bring astronomers of varying viewpoints together to discuss the controversy. "No votes will be taken at this conference to put specific objects in or out of the family of planets," APL's Dr. Hal Weaver, a conference organizer, said in a statement in May. "But we will have advocates of the IAU definition and proponents of alternative definitions presenting their cases."

The term plutoid joins a host of other odd words -- plutinos, centaurs, cubewanos and EKOs -- that astronomers use to define objects in the outer solar system.

* Why Planets Will Never Be Defined
* The History of the Pluto Controversy
* Gallery: Our New Solar System

* Original Story: Pluto Now Called a Plutoid

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Perfect storm' knocks out 911 service

* Much of Monday's storm damage was focused on the city's northwestern edge, authorities say.

J.D. Sumner

ALBANY — Calling it the “perfect storm,” Dougherty County’s EMA director says they still haven’t discovered how the area’s 911 system, designed to withstand most natural disasters, shut down during a thunderstorm Monday evening.

As rain, hail and near hurricane-force winds moved through the metro area around 8:30 p.m. Monday, Dougherty County’s lifeline between the public and public safety officials went down.

“It’s not supposed to happen,” EMA Director and Fire Chief James Carswell said. “I’m not sure exactly, at this point, why all of them failed; the phones were down, the radios were down, and the CAD system was down. Everything shut down.”

Carswell said that the system is designed to handle catastrophes including severe weather and power outages, but that, for some reason, all of the backups designed to keep the system functional, failed.

“I don’t know if we’re calling it the perfect storm or not, but everything that could go wrong did,” he said.

The storm that toppled trees and brought down power lines, shut off the department’s computer and telephone capabilities, Carswell said.

After several minutes, Carswell said that the system slowly started to come back on line, allowing just a few of the department’s lines to open.

Meanwhile, operators were forced to use portable radios to communicate with police, fire and EMS units who were responding during the storm.

The storm came virtually out of nowhere, giving area residents little advance notice through traditional TV and radio warnings. But the county’s new CODE RED notification system — which calls registered users when severe weather or other emergencies are threatening their area — was successfully used for the first time, Carswell said.

By Tuesday morning, most of the 1,000 people who lost power during the storm had it restored.

On the city’s northwestern edge, homes were more greatly impacted, Carswell said.

“There were a lot of trees down and lines down over near Nottingham, Gail and that area,” he said.

Despite the damage, no injuries were reported and no vital calls were missed while 911 was down, although Carswell said that an immediate investigation is under way to determine the cause of the failure.

from: http://www.albanyherald.com/archives/News/2008/front061108f.html

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Sleeping Your Way to the Top

Americans are not renowned for their powers of self-deprivation; doing without is not something we do particularly well. But experts say there is one necessity of life most of us consistently fail to get: a good night's sleep.

The recommended daily requirements should sound familiar: eight hours of sleep a night for adults and at least an hour more for adolescents. Yet 71% of American adults and 85% of teens do not get the suggested amount, to the detriment of body and mind. "Sleep is sort of like food," says Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. But, he adds, there's one important difference: "You can be quite starved and still alive, and I think we appreciate how horrible that must be. But many of us live on the edge of sleep starvation and just accept it."

Part of the problem is we are so used to being chronically sleep deprived--and have become so adept at coping with that condition--that we no longer notice how exhausted we really are. In 2003, sleep expert David Dinges and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine tested the effects of restricting slumber to eight, six or four hours a night for two weeks. During the first few days, subjects sleeping less than eight hours admitted to being fatigued and lacking alertness. But by Day 4, most people had adapted to their new baseline drowsiness and reported feeling fine--even as their cognitive performance continued to plummet.

Over time, the experiment's sleep-restricted subjects became so impaired that they had difficulty concentrating on even the simplest tasks, like pushing a button in response to a light. "The human brain is only capable of about 16 hours of wakefulness [a day]," says Dinges. "When you get beyond that, it can't function as efficiently, as accurately or as well."

In the real world, people overcome their somnolence--at least temporarily--by drinking coffee, taking a walk around the block or chatting with office mates. But then they find themselves nodding off in meetings or, worse, behind the wheel. Those short snatches of unconsciousness are what researchers call microsleep, a sure sign of sleep deprivation. "If people are falling asleep because 'the room was hot' or 'the meeting was boring,' that's not coping with sleep loss. I would argue that they're eroding their productive capability," says Dinges.

What most people don't realize is that the purpose of sleep may be more to rest the mind than to rest the body. Indeed, most of the benefits of eight hours' sleep seem to accrue to the brain: sleep helps consolidate memory, improve judgment, promote learning and concentration, boost mood, speed reaction time and sharpen problem solving and accuracy. According to Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego who has done extensive studies in the aging population, lack of sleep may even mimic the symptoms of dementia. In recent preliminary findings, she was able to improve cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's simply by treating their underlying sleep disorder. "The need for sleep does not change a lot with age," says Ancoli-Israel, but often because of disruptive illnesses and the medications used to treat them, "the ability to sleep does."

If you're one of the otherwise healthy yet perpetually underrested, there's plenty you can do to pay back your sleep debt. For starters, you can catch up on lost time. Take your mom's advice, and get to bed early. Turn off the TV half an hour sooner than usual. If you can't manage to snooze longer at night, try to squeeze in a midday nap. The best time for a siesta is between noon and 3 p.m., for about 30 to 60 minutes, according to Timothy Roehrs, director of research at the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. He advises against oversleeping on weekend mornings to make up for a workweek of deprivation; late rising can disrupt your circadian rhythm, making it even harder later to get a full night's rest.

According to Dinges' analysis of data from the 2003 American Time Use Survey, the most common reason we shortchange ourselves on sleep is work. (The second biggest reason, surprisingly, is that we spend too much time driving around in our cars.) But consider that in giving up two hours of bedtime to do more work, you're losing a quarter of your recommended nightly dose and gaining just 12% more time during the day. What if you could be 12% more productive instead? "You have to realize that if you get a good night's sleep, you will actually be more efficient and get more done the next day. The more you give up on sleep, the harder it is to be productive," says Ancoli-Israel. "What is it going to be?"

If mental sharpness is your goal, the answer is clear: stop depriving yourself, and get a good night's sleep.

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Report: At least 100 dead as Sudan Airways plane burns

(CNN) — At least 100 people were killed Tuesday when a Sudan Airways plane caught fire after landing in Khartoum, Sudan, according to officials and Sudanese television reports.

Sudanese television reported more than 200 people were on the plane. Several injured people were taken to a hospital, the network said, but the number of injured was not immediately known.

The plane was arriving from Amman, Jordan, airport security officials said, and was landing in bad weather when it overshot the runway, crashed and caught fire. “Many people” are believed dead, an official said.

However, it was not clear whether the plane actually crashed. The chief of the Khartoum airport told Al-Jazeera Arabic network the plane landed safely, but an explosion occurred in one of its engines before it came to a stop, about 10 minutes after the plane had landed.

From www.cnn.com
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Obama's first test: Handling Hillary

Barack Obama would like to remind you of something: He won and she didn’t. It’s about him now and not her. He has made history, and she is history.
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Not that Hillary Clinton admitted to any of that in her nonconcession concession speech Tuesday night, after Obama attained the delegate votes he needs for the Democratic presidential nomination

For someone giving indications she would like to be Obama’s running mate, Clinton was surprisingly ungracious. In fact, if you had just awakened from a (blissful) 17-month sleep, you would have thought she had won.

“Because of you, we won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes,” she told the crowd in New York City. “I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard and no longer to be invisible.”

But her fighting words only increased the need for Obama to show that he can be strong, tough and in charge. Clinton’s unwillingness to recognize Obama as the victor only increased the need for Obama to act like a president and not like a doormat. And denying her a vice presidential slot may be a way of doing that.

It has been a hard-fought and sometimes bitter campaign, but Obama is not, one of his senior advisers assured me Tuesday night, going to spend a lot of time in the next few months wooing Clinton supporters whose feelings may be hurting.

“I think there are always immediate feelings of disappointment and anger,” Anita Dunn said. “But in the months ahead, he must appeal not just to the constituency groups who favored her in the primaries, but those he wants in the general election, and that includes independents and Republicans.”

Another Obama adviser, who asked not to be identified, said that he was not worried that Clinton supporters would stay angry.

“Look at how many switched today to Obama,” he said. “Look at the Clinton supporters, look at Maxine Waters [the congresswoman from California who endorsed Hillary Clinton in late January but switched to Obama on Tuesday], who were passionate advocates for Hillary, but who switched to Obama.”

“At the end of the day,” he went on, “Hillary supporters will look at John McCain and decide they are not going to vote for a man who will put judges on the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

The easiest way, the Obama campaign has decided, to turn the page away from Clinton is to go at McCain full bore, start the general election campaign immediately and ignore the media chatter about what Hillary does or does not want.

“Now is the appropriate moment to begin the general election discussion,” Dunn said. “That is why Sen. Obama chose Minnesota [the site of the Republican convention in September] for his speech.”

And while Obama spent a few moments praising Clinton in his speech in St. Paul, he spent most of his time attacking McCain, raising the issue he so effectively used against Clinton: the need for change.

“Change is a foreign policy that doesn’t begin and end with a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged,” Obama said. He used that argument against Clinton, it worked, and now he is going to use it against McCain again and again.

“Obama put his stake in the ground tonight for the general election campaign, just like McCain put his stake in the ground for the general election campaign,” a senior Obama adviser told me. “The story will shift to that. Obviously, the vice presidency will be part of the back story, but there is going to be a pretty active general campaign story going on."

McCain did his part by giving a major speech in New Orleans on Tuesday night. “I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas,” McCain said. “Like others before him, he seems to think government is the answer to every problem.”

But the three speeches — Clinton’s, McCain’s and Obama’s — showed off one of Obama’s great advantages: While McCain was reasoned and detailed, while Clinton had a few good lines, Obama soared.

“Behind all the labels and false divisions and categories that define us, beyond all the petty bickering and point-scoring in Washington, Americans are a decent, generous, compassionate people,” he said. “America, this is our moment. This is our time.”

It was, after a momentous struggle, Barack Obama’s time Tuesday night. And he made sure everybody knew it.
From: Yahoo! News
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Low turn out California election results. A rough guess for pundits

The little watched California primary election have become every bit the ugly step brat pundits procrastinated. The divided California primaries are making news as the possible deciders as super delegates closed ranks and joined the Obama camp not aware of the damage they were causing to the party. Thousands of Clinton diehards and supporters are swearing to trump Obama with their votes. Thousands others say that they would never vote for Obama - even if Clinton asked them to. The voting trend was similar in many counties like the San Francisco County.

Voters ignored the local polling stations since the contests have lost its heat. Before the polls fewer people were seen around polling stations unlike before. At 8 p.m. only 150 people had turned up at a Bernal Heights polling station at the Back of St. Kevin’s Church in San Francisco, a neighborhood which is revered for its political involvement. “I just didn’t see much reason to vote,” a voter commented in Mendocino County. In San Mateo County, elections official David Tom said that the primary would be a sham since the voters would be just sleep inducing. “The predictions will be a rough guess for the pundits”. Contra Costa County’s county results were not different and the clerks say this was a likely test to evaluate the committed voting citizens.

from: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world/low-turn-out-california-election-results-a-rough-guess-for-pundits_10056392.html

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