Large amounts of money are being siphoned from the multi-billion dollar cigarette smuggling trade and going right into the pockets of terrorist networks and international organized crime. 

A United Nations Security Council investigative body, the Group of Experts, has reported that millions of dollars in illicit tobacco revenues are reaching al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, and is financing Congolese rebels for the recruitment of child soldiers, mass rape and murders.

 The World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has determined that 600 billion counterfeited and smuggled cigarettes cross national borders annually. This represents $50 billion in lost proceeds affecting nations throughout the world.

NASA Goes To The Arctic

NASA is sending a team of scientists to study the Arctic at close quarters.  I guess it's pretty hard to sample phytoplankton with a satellite.

NASA Icebreaker Voyage To Probe Climate Change Impact On Arctic
 
WASHINGTON -- NASA's first dedicated oceanographic field campaign goes to sea June 15 to take an up-close look at how changing conditions in the Arctic are affecting the ocean's chemistry and ecosystems that play a critical role in global climate change.

Time for a little space business by a citizen scientist-- an ordinary scienc-y person who just happens to be building a personal satellite in his basement.  I'm at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum today, where scientists and policy makers try to tackle space weather awareness from a real world 'money&lives' stance. On Friday I'll write it up in my main column, but for now I'm going to connect these issues with some 'Project Calliope' concerns.

When launching a personal satellite, who will be at fault if there is trouble with the satellite?

A CNN headline reads "Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems, study suggests".

Interesting, but wait...

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations...

The involvement of mothers may be a contributing factor [to having fewer behavioral problems], in addition to the fact that the pregnancies were planned, Gartrell said.

The children "didn't arrive by accident," she said. "The mothers were older... they were waiting for an opportunity to have children and age brings maturity and better parenting."

The polar regions are far, far away for most people. Do not count me in among 'most people' though. As a Norwegian I practically live in the Arctic. There are only 8 nations that are (partly) situated in the Arctic: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and USA Several countries claim rights in Antarctica, which is regulated by the Antarctic Treaty . Sometimes we talk about a third pole, namely The Himalayas. Common for all three regions are remoteness and inaccessibility.

Via GenomeWeb's Daily Scan, some comments on the prospects for citizen science in The Chronicle of Higher Education.


Only one of the three appears to be an actual research scientist, but they make good points about the role of citizen science in research. For example, Clifford A. Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked information:

I'm not wild about the term "crowdsourcing" and I think it's actually important to disentangle the developments.

Arctic Ice June 2010 - Update


This is an update to my article Arctic Ice June 2010, part of my ongoing series of articles about the Arctic.

The NSIDC ice extent graph shows a fairly constant and greater then average rate of ice loss over the last four weeks.

Arctic Sea Ice Entent June 07 2010 - NSIDC
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
.


In an article published May 06 2010 I wrote:

Terraforming is the concept of engineering planets to make them habitable for terrestrial life. This idea was born out of fiction. Olaf Stapledon, in his 1930 novel Last and First Men, first described a project undertaken to make Venus suitable for humans which began by placing photosynthetic plants on the surface to release oxygen. In 1942, Jack Williamson coined the term “terraforming” in his short story "Collision Orbit."  In 1961, Carl Sagan wrote the first academic paper on terraforming and published it in Science, moving the terraforming to the realm of serious scientific pursuit.

Ah, the joy to see bosons in our first 7-TeV proton-proton collisions at LHC! The CMS experiment has released two days ago its first results on W and Z bosons, plus many other riches. Of course, these plots are only demonstrative, since the statistics is still ridiculously poor if compared with the wealth of data available at the Tevatron. But still, these are collisions at 3.5 times more energy, and the machine is doubling its luminosity every week or so, so I expect that very soon the distributions will stop looking rough and will start containing real information, to be converted in meaningful measurements of the relevant physical quantities.

J/Psi mesons

Researchers have come a long way from initially cracking the DNA code since the time of Watson and Crick, to now unveiling the complex layers of molecular codes that make up the cell’s molecular fingerprint.

These codes are no longer restricted to the 4 nucleotide codes of the DNA sequence, but rather a complex web of coding systems that regulate every stage of gene expression, including the epigenetic codes (transcriptional), microRNA codes (translational), as well as codes derived from alternative splicing of RNA transcripts (post-translational). While the existence of these codes are now dogma to most cell biologists, precisely how these codes dictate the identity of cells in a multicellular organism still remains elusive.