Weird Links

A huge offshore oil discovery could raise Brazil's petroleum reserves by a whopping 40 percent and boost this country into the ranks of the world's major exporters..

The government-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, said the new "ultra-deep" Tupi field could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude, sending Petrobras shares soaring and prompting predictions that Brazil could join the world's "top 10" oil producers.

The AT&T technician who stumbled across a secret room in the company's San Francisco facility which was sending copies of all telephone and Internet communications to the NSA, is on Capitol Hill this week, urging Congress not to give immunity to the telecommunications companies for their illegal cooperation with the Administration's domestic surveillance program.

Chief UN atomic watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding "fuel to the fire" with recent bellicose rhetoric.

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown. Decline in gas, coal and uranium also predicted.

Seems like Gordon Brown will push this one through parliament without a referendum, so you may as well read as much about it as you can.

The United Kingdom is planning to claim sovereign rights over a vast area of the remote seabed off Antarctica, the Guardian has learned. The submission to the United Nations covers more than 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) of seabed, and is likely to signal a quickening of the race for territory around the south pole in the world's least explored continent.

The claim would be in defiance of the spirit of the 1959 Antarctic treaty, to which the UK is a signatory. It specifically states that no new claims shall be asserted on the continent. The treaty was drawn up to prevent territorial disputes.

This is a research article evaluating data from two recent (2006) publications of portions of the Neanderthal genome sequence. The authors conclude that: "these studies show that they are not consistent with each other and point to serious problems with the data quality in one of the studies, possibly due to modern human DNA contaminants and/or a high rate of sequencing errors". Which just goes to show that you shouldn't believe everything you read

References:

Noonan JP, Coop G, Kudaravalli S, Smith D, Krause J, et al. (2006) Sequencing and analysis of Neanderthal genomic DNA. Science 314: 1113-1118.

Green RE, Krause J, Ptak SE, Briggs AW, Ronan MT, et al. (2006) Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA. Nature 16: 330-336.

Wall JD, Kim SK (2007) Inconsistencies in Neanderthal genomic DNA sequences. PLoS Genet 3(10): e175. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030175

Strong worldwide economic growth has accelerated the level of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere to a dangerous threshold scientists had not expected for another decade, according to a leading Australian climate change expert.

Delayed gamma rays from deep space may provide the first evidence for physics beyond current theories.

The MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope found that high-energy photons of gamma radiation from a distant galaxy arrived at Earth four minutes after lower-energy photons, although they were apparently emitted at the same time. If correct, that would contradict Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons (particles of light) must move at the speed of light.

The chromosome which Venter and his team has created is known as Mycoplasma laboratorium and, in the final step of the process, will be transplanted into a living cell where it should "take control," effectively becoming a new life form.