Three gods: The hardest logic puzzle ever

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Indian rape victim arrives in S'pore for further treatment

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SINGAPORE: An Indian student who was left fighting for her life after being gang-raped in New Delhi has arrived at Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital for further treatment.

The patient arrived at the hospital's Intensive Care Unit at 9.05am in extremely critical condition, said the hospital's spokesperson on Thursday.

The hospital is working with the Indian High Commission, and has requested that the privacy of the patient and the family be respected.

The 23-year-old, whose attack sparked protests across India, had been transferred from the Safdarjung hospital in central Delhi to Medanta hospital in Gurgaon, close to the city's international airport, before being flown to Singapore.

"The decision was taken this morning at cabinet," a source at Safdarjung told AFP early Thursday. "Her mother and father are with her."

The government had earlier announced it was setting up a special commission of inquiry after the gang-rape on December 16 when the woman was allegedly tricked into boarding a bus by six men who then took turns to assault her.

The group also attacked her with an iron bar before throwing her out of the vehicle, along with a male companion.

Six suspects have been arrested in connection with the attack and have been remanded in custody.

- CNA/AFP/al



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Tap Twitter, control a cockroach

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Too bad we can't control all cockroaches through Twitter. Yuck.



(Credit:
Brittany Ransom)


Next time you see a cockroach, don't scurry away faster than it can flee. In fact, if you're a lover of the weirder side of life, the intrusive insect could represent one heck of a science project.


For example, artist Brittany Ransom created Twitter Roach -- a discoid cockroach that can be controlled through tweets that it receives on the popular microblogging service.




As it turns out, humans can actually control cockroaches with a device called RoboRoach -- a tiny electronic backpack that attaches to a cockroach and stimulates the bug's antenna nerves, enabling the controller to turn the insect left or right with the press of a button.


Ransom built upon the Roboroach concept and added some Arduino hardware and custom-programmed software to link the bug to Twitter. While on display at the "Life, in some form" art exhibition by the Chicago Artists Coalition, visitors could send the @TweetRoach account commands such as "#TweetRoachLeft" and #TweetRoachRight."





The Tweet Roach sits while awaiting its next command.



(Credit:
Brittany Ransom)



Those of you concerned about insect welfare can rest easy; the roach didn't stay enslaved all day long. Ransom told Crave via e-mail that the bug "wears the backpack for short intervals" and "is only accessible to the Twitter community during designated times." To avoid a flood of commands, Ransom set the cockroach to receive no more than one tweet every 30 seconds.


Why would someone take on such a strange project? Ransom says she's exploring a kind of insectoid parallel to the digital overstimulation many of us experience today. She aims to see if the cockroach can learn to eventually learn to adapt and ignore the stimulating effects of her setup.


"At what point does its intelligence and ability take over? How much does it take before we are all desensitized to overstimulation? As we, as human beings, grow more cyborgian and interconnected through social media, this project helps us participate in discovering the answer," Ransom said in an e-mail about the project.



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Space Pictures This Week: Green Lantern, Supersonic Star

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Toyota Agrees to $1B Settlement in Acceleration Case

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Toyota has agreed to pay more than $1 billion to customers to settle a class action lawsuit that alleged its vehicles accelerated dangerously and without warning, according to statements by the carmaker and the plaintiffs' attorney.


The deal, which still needs approval by a federal judge in California, includes a $250 million fund to be paid to Toyota owners who sold their cars at a loss following reports of vehicle malfunctions, as well as the installation of a brake override system in about 3.25 million vehicles


An additional $250 million fund will be created to pay those owners whose vehicles are not eligible for the retrofitted brakes.






David Zalubowski/AP PHoto







Toyota recalled more than 14 million vehicles after reports of sudden, unexplained acceleration in several models began to surface between 2009 and 2010. There were also reports of brake problems with the Prius hybrid.


Toyota insists that it was not an electrical flaw that caused the acceleration problems, but driver error, floor mats and sticky gas pedals.


Both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and NASA have said there is nothing in wrong with programs that run the vehicles' onboard computers


"From the very start, this was a challenging case," said Steve Berman, the plaintiffs' lawyer. "We brought in automotive experts, physicists and some of the world's leading theoreticians in electrical engineering to help us understand what happened to drivers experiencing sudden acceleration."


The settlement also includes $30 million to be given to outside groups to study automotive safety.


In a statement, Toyota agreed to the deal.


"In keeping with our core principles, we have structured this agreement in ways that work to put our customers first and demonstrate that they can count on Toyota to stand behind our vehicles." said Toyota spokesman Christopher P. Reynolds.



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New Scientist 2012 holiday quiz

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THIS was the year we held our breath in almost unbearable anticipation while we waited to see whether physicists at the Large Hadron Collider would finally get a clear view of the Higgs boson, so tantalisingly hinted at last December. Going a bit blue, we held on through March when one of the LHC's detectors seemed to lose sight of the thing, before exhaling in a puff of almost-resolution in July, when researchers announced that the data added up to a fairly confident pretty-much-actual-discovery of the particle.












Early indications were that it might be a weird and wonderful variety of the Higgs, prompting a collective gasp of excitement. That was followed by a synchronised sigh of mild disappointment when later data implied that it was probably the most boring possible version after all, and not a strange entity pointing the way to new dimensions and the true nature of dark matter. Prepare yourself for another puff or two as the big story moves on next year.













This respirational rollercoaster might be running a bit too slowly to supply enough oxygen to the brain of a New Scientist reader, so we have taken care to provide more frequent oohs and aahs using less momentous revelations. See how many of the following unfundamental discoveries you can distinguish from the truth-free mimics that crowd parasitically around them.












1. Which of these anatomical incongruities of the animal kingdom did we describe on 14 July?












  • a) A fish, found in a canal in Vietnam, that wears its genitals under its mouth
  • b) A frog, found in a puddle in Peru, that has no spleen
  • c) A lizard, found in a cave in Indonesia, that has four left feet
  • d) A cat, found in a tree in northern England, that has eight extra teeth

2. "A sprout by any other name would taste as foul." So wrote William Shakespeare in his diary on 25 December 1598, setting off the centuries of slightly unjust ridicule experienced by this routinely over-cooked vegetable. But which forbiddingly named veg did we report on 7 July as having more health-giving power than the sprout, its active ingredient being trialled as a treatment for prostate cancer?












  • a) Poison celery
  • b) Murder beans
  • c) Inconvenience potatoes
  • d) Death carrots

3. Scientists often like to say they are opening a new window on things. Usually that is a metaphor, but on 10 November we reported on a more literal innovation in the fenestral realm. It was:












  • a) A perspex peephole set in the nest of the fearsome Japanese giant hornet, to reveal its domestic habits
  • b) A glass porthole implanted in the abdomen of a mouse, to reveal the process of tumour metastasis
  • c) A crystal portal in the inner vessel of an experimental thorium reactor, to reveal its nuclear fires to the naked eye
  • d) A small window high on the wall of a basement office in the Princeton physics department, to reveal a small patch of sky to postgraduate students who have not been outside for seven years

4. On 10 March we described a new material for violin strings, said to produce a brilliant and complex sound richer than that of catgut. What makes up these super strings?












  • a) Mousegut
  • b) Spider silk
  • c) Braided carbon nanotubes
  • d) An alloy of yttrium and ytterbium

5. While the peril of climate change looms inexorably larger, in this festive-for-some season we might take a minute to look on the bright side. On 17 March we reported on one benefit of global warming, which might make life better for some people for a while. It was:












  • a) Receding Arctic sea ice will make it easier to lay undersea cables to boost internet speeds
  • b) Increasing temperatures mean that Greenlanders can soon start making their own wine
  • c) Rising sea levels could allow a string of new beach resorts to open in the impoverished country of Chad
  • d) More acidic seawater will add a pleasant tang to the salt water taffy sweets made in Atlantic City

6. In Alaska's Glacier Bay national park, the brown bear in the photo (above, right) is doing something never before witnessed among bearkind, as we revealed on 10 March. Is it:












  • a) Making a phonecall?
  • b) Gnawing at a piece of whalebone to dislodge a rotten tooth?
  • c) Scratching itself with a barnacle-covered stone tool?
  • d) Cracking oysters on its jaw?

7. Men have much in common with fruit flies, as we revealed on 24 March. When the sexual advances of a male fruit fly are rejected, he may respond by:












  • a) Whining
  • b) Hitting the booze
  • c) Jumping off a tall building
  • d) Hovering around the choosy female long after all hope is lost

8. While great Higgsian things were happening at the LHC, scientists puzzled over a newly urgent question: what should we call the boson? Peter Higgs wasn't the only physicist to predict its existence, and some have suggested that the particle's name should also include those other theorists or perhaps reflect some other aspect of the particle. Which of the following is a real suggestion that we reported on 24 March?

























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'Yak insurance' plan saving Nepal's snow leopard

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KATHMANDU: The remorse felt by Himali Chungda Sherpa after he killed three snow leopard cubs in retaliation for his lost cattle inspired him to set up a scheme to prevent other herders from doing the same.

Sherpa lost his cattle near Ghunsa village at the base of Mount Kangchenjunga on the Nepal-India border, later finding their remains in a cave beside three sleeping snow leopard cubs.

The Nepalese herder put the cubs in a sack and threw them into the river, finding their bodies the next day.

"From that night onwards the mother snow leopard started crying from the mountain for her cubs, and my cattle were crying for the loss of their calves."

"I realised how big a sin I had committed and promised myself that I would never do such a thing in the future."

Four years ago Sherpa, 48, founded with other locals an insurance plan for livestock that conservationists say is deterring herders from killing snow leopards that attack their animals.

In doing so the scheme has given hope for the endangered cat, whose numbers across the mountains of 12 countries in south and central Asia are thought to have declined by 20 percent over the past 16 years.

Under the scheme, herders pay in 55 rupees a year for each of their hairy yaks, the vital pack animal that is also kept for milk and meat, and are paid 2,500 rupees for any animal killed by the endangered cat.

"The (Himalayan) communities have been able to pay out compensation for more than 200 animals since the scheme started," WWF Nepal conservation director Ghana Gurung told reporters at a presentation in the capital Kathmandu.

"The community members are the ones that monitor this, they are the ones who do the patrolling and they are the ones who verify the kills."

The global snow leopard population is estimated at just 4,080-6,590 adults according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which lists the animal as "endangered" on its red list of threatened species.

Experts believe just 300 to 500 adults survive in Nepal, and few can claim ever to have seen the secretive, solitary "mountain ghost", which lives 5,000 to 6,000 metres above sea level.

Despite its name, it is not a close relative of the leopard and has much more in common genetically with the tiger, though it is thought to have a placid temperament.

"There has never been a case of a snow leopard attacking a human," Gurung said of the animal, revered for its thick grey patterned pelt.

It does, however, have a taste for sheep, goats and other livestock essential for the livelihoods of farmers and is often killed by humans either as a preventative measure or in revenge for the deaths of their animals.

WWF Nepal revealed details of its insurance scheme in filmed interviews shown at the recent Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival.

Sherpa now campaigns to convince Himalayan farmers that killing snow leopards is wrong, but has been frequently told they need to kill the animal to protect their livelihoods.

"I swear if I can catch a snow leopard. They rob our animals and our source of livelihood," herder Chokyab Bhuttia told the WWF.

The insurance plan, which also covers sheep and goats, was set up with 1.2 million rupees donated by the University of Zurich.

Since the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area Snow Leopard Insurance plan was launched four years ago no snow leopard is thought to have been killed in retaliation for preying on livestock since.

Locals, who count the number of cattle attacked as well as tracks, faecal pellets and scratches in the ground, believe snow leopard numbers have significantly increased.

"There is now an awareness among people that the snow leopard is an endangered animal and we have to protect it. The insurance policy has made people more tolerant to the loss of their livestock," Sherpa said.

He believes protecting the snow leopard is vital to boosting the economy in an area which gets just a few hundred trekkers a year, compared with 74,000 in Annapurna.

"If a tourist sees a snow leopard and takes a picture of it there will be publicity of our region and more tourists will come," Sherpa said.

Evidence of the scheme's benefits will remain anecdotal until the publication next year of the results of a wide-ranging camera trapping survey.

But locals are optimistic about the animal's future, according to Tsheten Dandu Sherpa, chairman of the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area Management Council.

"In this area there was never any poaching of snow leopards for trade. They were killed only as a retaliatory act by livestock owners," he said.

"Now with this insurance policy there will definitely be protection of the snow leopard and its numbers will increase."

-AFP/fl



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Stuxnet attacks Iran again, reports say

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An Iranian news agency says the country successfully fended off yet another attack by the Stuxnet worm, according to reports.


The cyberattack targeted a power plant and other sites in southern Iran over the fall, the BBC and the Associated Press reported today.


Discovered in June 2010, Stuxnet is believed to be the first malware targeted specifically at critical infrastructure systems. It's thought to have been designed to shut down centrifuges at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant, where stoppages and other problems reportedly occurred around that time. The sophisticated worm spreads via USB drives and through four previously unknown holes, known as zero-day vulnerabilities, in Windows.


Stuxnet is just one of several versions of malware aimed at Middle Eastern countries in the past two and a half years. Along Stuxnet, there have arisen Duqu, Gauss, Mahdi, Flame, Wiper, and Shamoon.


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Photos: Humboldt Squid Have a Bad Day at the Beach

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Photograph by Chris Elmenhurst, Surf the Spot Photography

“Strandings have been taking place with increased frequency along the west coast over the past ten years,” noted NOAA’s Field, “as this population of squid seems to be expanding its range—likely a consequence of climate change—and can be very abundant at times.” (Learn about other jumbo squid strandings.)

Humboldt squid are typically found in warmer waters farther south in theGulf of California (map) and off the coast ofPeru. “[But] we find them up north here during warmer water time periods,” said ocean sciences researcherKenneth Bruland with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Coastal upwelling—when winds blowing south drive ocean circulation to bring cold, nutrient-rich waters up from the deep—ceases during the fall and winter and warmer water is found closer to shore. Bruland noted that climate change, and the resulting areas of low oxygen, “could be a major factor” in drawing jumbo squid north.

Published December 24, 2012

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Christmas Tornadoes Tear Across South

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A nasty Christmastime storm system spawned blizzard conditions in some states and at least 15 reported tornadoes in the South, damaging homes, taking out power lines and dangerously snarling holiday travel.


Severe weather swept across the United States during the Christmas holiday, bringing tornadoes and intense thunderstorms to the Gulf Coast, while dumping heavy snow and freezing rain on the Southern Plains.


At least 15 tornadoes were reported today from Texas to Alabama, putting this storm system potentially on track to be one of the largest Christmas day tornado outbreaks on record.


One large tornado was reported in Mobile, Ala., where there are about 19,000 customers without power and 23,429 statewide, according to Alabama Power. Kerry Burns, a Mobile resident originally from Boston, said the storm "sounded like a freight train."


Some buildings in the area, including some churches and a local high school, were reportedly damaged. Ray Uballe, another Mobile resident, said his dad was shaken up.


"He was in his apartment," Uballe said. "He said it sounded like an airplane and then the door flung open and then there was just debris flying."


Douglas Mark Nix, president of the Infirmary Health System, said one of their Mobile hospitals lost power and sustained damage. There were no early reports of injuries to staff or patients.


"We are operating now on generator power," he said. "We do not have substantial damage but we do have a number of windows out and we have some ceiling tiles down, throughout the facility at the main hospital.


"We can run for at least two weeks but I saw power crews out all over the city so I fully expect power to be restored within the next day or so," Nix added.






Melinda Martinez/The Daily Town Talk/AP Photo















Winter Weather Causes Holiday Travel Problems Watch Video





At least eight states were issued blizzard warnings today, as the storms made highways dangerously slick heading into one of the busiest travel days of the year.


Oklahoma got about 7 inches of snow all over the state making for treacherous road conditions. ABC News affiliate KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City said the weather was being blamed for a 21-vehicle wreck on Interstate 40, but no one was seriously injured.


Ice accumulation in Arkansas bent trees and power lines, leaving at least 50,000 customers across the state without power. About 10 inches of snow fell on Fayetteville, Ark.


The storms, which first wreaked havoc on the West Coast before moving east, are being blamed for at least one death in Texas.


Investigators in the Houston area told ABC state KTRK-TV in Houston that a young man was trying to move a downed tree that was blocking the roadway when another one snapped and fell on top of him. He was later pronounced dead at a hopsital.


The last time a number of tornadoes hit the Gulf Coast area around Christmas Day was in 2009, when 22 tornadoes struck on Christmas Eve morning, National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro told ABC News over email.


The deadliest Christmastime tornado outbreak on record was Dec. 24 to 26, 1982, when 29 tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi killed three people and injured 32.


The last killer tornado around Christmas, Vaccaro said, was a Christmas Eve EF4 in Tennessee in 1988, which killed one person and injured seven. EF4 tornadoes can produce winds up to 200 mph.


No official word yet on the strength of the string of tornadoes reported today.


While some were preparing for a Christmas feast, others were hunkered down.


More than 180 flights nationwide were canceled by midday, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.com. More than half were canceled by American Airlines and its regional affiliate, American Eagle.


The storm system is expected to continue east into Georgia and the Carolinas Wednesday and could potentially spawn more tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service.


ABC News' Matt Gutman, Max Golembo and ABC News Radio contributed to this report.



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