BP Spill Case-Criminal Charges against BP Workers,

The charges would mark the first criminal charges stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed 11 people, injured 17 and caused almost 5 million barrels of crude oil to spill.

 A conviction would call for up to five years in prison in addition to a fine, the paper said.

It’s not clear specifically which employees federal prosecutors are eyeing, but they are reportedly focused on several Houston engineers and at least one of their supervisors. Prosecutors may still elect not to charge these employees criminally, the Journal reported. U.S. prosecutors are reportedly considering filing criminal charges against employees,

 The U.K. energy giant’s role in the worst offshore oil spill in American history.

According to The Wall Street Journal, federal officials may disclose felony charges early next year against employees who may have provided false information to regulators about the risks tied to the Gulf of Mexico well while drilling was ongoing.

At the same time, legal experts told the paper BP is likely to face broader criminal charges, including for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act.

U.S.-listed shares of BP slipped 0.05% to $42.34 ahead of the open, while the company’s London-listed stock gained 0.21%., which has since become ExxonMobil (XOM: 86.00, +1.24, +1.46%), faced a slew of criminal charges over the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil spill, which involved 11 million barrels of oil.

The threat of charges to pressure people to cooperate in investigations. Legal experts say BP itself is expected to face broader criminal charges, including violations of the federal Clean Water Act; the company already is appealing what could amount to $36.6 million in administrative fines levied by U.S. regulators for safety violations. The size of the fines hasn't been finalized. The company has said it believed the accident was caused by a combination of events that involved multiple parties, not just BP.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

A federal task force based in New Orleans has spent the past 18 months investigating the April 2010 accident. Prosecutors have reviewed thousands of documents and conducted dozens of interviews, including bringing some individuals before a grand jury, according to people close to the investigation.

Criminal charges have been brought in previous oil spills, most notably the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, in which an Exxon oil tanker hit a reef off the Alaskan coast and spilled 11 million gallons of crude. Exxon, now Exxon Mobil Corp., faced five criminal charges, including two felonies for placing an incompetent crew on the ship and three misdemeanour charges of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Clean Water Act.

Alternative calculations, based on an assumption that the sea water rather than oil was drained from the damaged tanks, estimate the total to have been 25 to 32 million US gallons.

The company later reached a settlement under which it pleaded guilty to four misdemeanors and paid $100 million in restitution. The company also paid $900 million to Alaska and the federal government for damaging natural resources.

The only individual charged in the Valdez case was Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who was accused of three felonies-criminal mischief, operating the ship while intoxicated and reckless endangerment-and a misdemeanour charge of negligently discharging oil.

A jury found him guilty only of the misdemeanour, and he was sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service and $50,000 in restitution.

The ship was carrying approximately 55 million US gallons (210,000 m³) of oil, of which about 11 to 32 million US gallons (42,000 to 120,000 m³) were spilled into the Prince William Sound. A figure of 11 million US gallons (42,000 m³) was a commonly accepted estimate of the spill's volume and has been used by the State of Alaska's Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club Some groups, such as Defenders of Wildlife, dispute the official estimates, maintaining that the volume of the spill has been underreported.

Warm Chang in Climate

'By comparing these two marine species' we hope to assess how a polar environment shapes responses to environmental stress," says Marsh. "By better understanding how the environment can trigger genetic changes,-- through the genes the polar worm turns on or 'expresses' -- we can gain insight into the potential impact of global warming on marine ecosystems."

"A three-foot-diameter hole needs to be drilled through about seven feet of ice, and then a heated dive hut must be placed over the newly drilled hole in order to prevent it from freezing over -- and to keep the divers happy when they surface out of the seawater, which is at a temperature of minus one degree Celsius,"

 By tracking changes in metabolic activity and locating genes where methylation changes are active, the scientists will be able to pinpoint the types of genes involved in the temperature acclimation process.

Marsh says he hopes the results of the study will shed light on the ability of some Antarctic species to survive current levels of ocean warming.

"The coastal waters around Antarctica have been at very stable temperatures for millions of years," Marsh says. "This low-temperature environment has led to the evolution of many endemic polar marine species. As global sea-surface temperatures rise, temperatures in Antarctica will also increase. For animals that are used to constant cold conditions, even might increases in temperature can have large impacts on survival."

"This information has a huge potential for commercial use in the field of synthetic biology," Marsh notes. "Many of the industrial-scale processes that utilize enzymes require that these proteins are synthetically designed to work efficiently under extreme conditions. In bioreactors, for example, conditions of high heat or high acid are common and require bioengineered proteins for increased stability and catalytic efficiency."

To understand their history, Aronson and a team of palaeontologists collected marine fossils at Seymour Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. Linda Ivany of Syracuse University reconstructed changes in the Antarctic climate from chemical signals preserved in ancient clamshells. As temperatures dropped about 41 million years ago and crabs and fish were frozen out, the slow-moving predators that remained could not keep up with their prey. Snails, once out of danger, gradually lost the spines and other shell armor they had evolved against crushing predators.

Antarctica's coastal waters are warming rapidly. Temperatures at the sea surface off the western Antarctic Peninsula went up 1°C in the last 50 years, making it one of the fastest-warming regions of the World Ocean.

If the crab invasion succeeds, it will devastate Antarctica's spectacular fauna and fundamentally alter its ecological relationships. "That would be a tragic loss for biodiversity in one of the last truly wild places on earth," says Aronson. "Unless we can get control of ship traffic and greenhouse-gas emissions, climate change will ruin marine communities in Antarctica and make the world a sadder, duller place."

But this situation is about to change. "Populations of predatory king crabs are already living in deeper, slightly warmer water," "And increasing ship traffic is introducing exotic crab invaders. When ships dump their ballast water in the Antarctic seas, marine larvae from as far away as the Arctic are injected into the system."

Advance 'Brain Reading' Demonstrated”

UCLA's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology, researchers use functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity. They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify the cognitive state,

the UCLA research team describes several crucial advances in this field, using fMRI and machine learning methods to perform "brain reading" on smokers experiencing nicotine cravings.

The research, presented last week at the Neural Information Processing Systems' Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging workshop in Spain, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is interested in using these method to help people control drug cravings,"We are interested in exploring the relationships between structure and function in the human brain, particularly as related to higher-level cognition, such as mental imagery," Anderson said. "The lab is engaged in the active exploration of modern data-analysis approaches, such as machine learning, with special attention to methods that reveal systems-level neural organization."

For the study, smokers sometimes watched videos meant to induce cravings, sometimes watched "neutral" videos and at sometimes watched no video at all. They were instructed to attempt to fight nicotine cravings when they arose.

The data from fMRI scans taken of the study participants was then analyzed. Traditional machine learning methods were augmented by Markov processes, which use past history to predict future states. By measuring the brain networks active over time during the scans, the resulting machine learning algorithms were able to anticipate changes in subjects' underlying neurocognitive structure, predicting with a high degree of accuracy (90 percent for some of the models tested) what they were watching and, as far as cravings were concerned, how they were reacting to what they viewed.

"We detected whether people were watching and resisting cravings, indulging in them, or watching videos that were unrelated to smoking or cravings," said Anderson, who completed her Ph.D. in statistics at UCLA. "Essentially, we were predicting and detecting what kind of videos people were watching and whether they were resisting their cravings.""By projecting our problem of isolating specific networks associated with cravings into the domain of neurology, the technique does more than classify brain states -- it actually helps us to better understand the way the brain resists cravings," added Cohen, who also directs UCLA's Neuroengineering Training Program.

Remarkably, by placing this problem into neurological terms, the decoding process becomes significantly more reliable and accurate, the researchers said. This is especially significant, they said, because it is unusual to use prior outcomes and states in order to inform the machine learning algorithms, and it is particularly challenging in the brain because so much is unknown about how the brain works.

Machine learning typically involves two steps: a "training phase" in which the computer evaluates a set of known outcomes -- say, a bunch of trials in which a subject indicated belief or disbelief -- and a second, "prediction" phase in which the computer builds a boundary based on that knowledge.

“Christmas present to the people who will stay at Paranal over Christmas." The European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile”

The recently discovered Comet Lovejoy has been captured in stunning photos and time-lapse video taken from the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The comet graced the southern sky after it had unexpectedly survived a close encounter with the Sun.
A new time-lapse video sequence was taken by Gabriel Brammer from ESO less than two days ago on Dec. 22, 2011. Gabriel was finishing his shift as support astronomer at the Paranal Observatory when Comet Lovejoy rose over the horizon just before dawn,
In the words of Gabriel Brammer himself: "On the last morning of my shift I tried to try catch it on camera before sunrise. The tail of the comet was easily visible with the naked eye, and the combination of the crescent Moon, comet, Milky Way and the laser guide star was nearly as impressive to the naked eye as it appears in the long-exposure photos."
The sequence also features the pencil-thin beam of the VLT's Laser Guide Star set against the beautiful backdrop of the Milky Way, as astronomers conduct their last observations for the night.

ESO optician Guillaume Blanchard made a marvellous wide-angle photo of Comet Lovejoy and ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky, captured the spectacle from Santiago de Chile. Blanchard said: "For me this comet is a Christmas present to the people who will stay at Paranal over Christmas."
the astronomy community over the past few weeks. It was discovered Nov. 27 by the Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy and was classified as a Kreutz sungrazer, with its orbit taking it very close to the Sun. (Kreutz sungrazers are members of a family of comets thought to come from the break up of one single large comet in the 12th century, and which now orbit the Sun along the same path.) Just last week, the comet entered the Sun's corona, a much-anticipated event, passing a mere 140,000 kilometres from the Sun's surface. A close shave indeed..
The comet was expected to break up and vaporise, but instead it survived its steaming hot encounter with the Sun and re-emerged a few days later, much to everyone's surprise. It is now visible from the southern hemisphere, appearing at dawn, and features a bright tail millions of kilometres long, composed of dust particles that are being blown ahead of the comet by the solar wind.Lovejoy will now continue in its highly eccentric orbit around the Sun and once again disappear into the distant Solar System. It would be interesting to know if it will actually survive to re-appear in our skies in 314 years as predictedLovejoy will now continue in its highly eccentric orbit around the Sun and once again disappear into the distant Solar System. It would be interesting to know if it will actually survive to re-appear in our skies in 314 years as predicted

2 Earth-size planets spotted around distant star

Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.

Scientists are seeking Earth-sized planets as potential homes for extraterrestrial life, said Fressin, who reports the new findings in a paper published online Tuesday by the journal Nature. One planet's diameter is only 3 percent larger than Earth's, while the other's diameter is about nine-tenths that of Earth. They appear to be rocky, like our planet.

But they are too hot to contain life as we know it, with calculated temperatures of about 1,400 degrees and 800 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. Any life found on another plant may not be intelligent; it could be bacteria or mold or some completely unknown form,
Since it was launched in 2009, NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope has found evidence of dozens of possible Earth-sized planets. But Fressin's report is the first to provide confirmation, said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington. He's a member of the Kepler science team but not an author of the paper.
The researchers ruled out a possible alternative explanation for the signals that initially indicated the planets were orbiting the star Kepler-20. The star is 950 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra.
The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are part of a five-planet system around the star, and their location challenges current understanding of how planets form, scientists said. In our own solar system, the small rocky planets are closest to the sun, while gaseous giants are on the periphery. But the five-planet system has no such dividing line; big and small planets alternate as one moves away from the star.
That's "crazy," and unexplained by current understanding of how planets form around stars, said study co-author and Harvard scientist David Charbonneau. Earlier this month, scientists said they'd found a planet around another distant star with a life-friendly surface temperature of about 72 degrees. But it was too big to suggest life on its surface. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it could be more like the gas-and-liquid Neptune with only a rocky core and mostly ocean, scientists said