Into the Kraken: NASA shows submarine plans for seas on Saturn’s moon Titan

What could be more exotic and exciting than a liquid methane sea on a faraway moon?

NASA has the answer: The space agency has prepared a video showing a plan for a submarine designed to study the depths of a sea on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

Titan is the only known body in our solar system with liquid seas and lakes, aside from Earth. And NASA wants to know what Kraken Mare, the largest sea on Titan, is like.

NASA has developed a plan to eventually put a submarine into the depths of a methane sea on Saturn's moon Titan

“This craft will autonomously carry out detailed scientific investigations under the surface of Kraken Mare, providing unprecedented knowledge of an extraterrestrial sea and expanding NASA’s existing capabilities in planetary exploration to include in situ nautical operations,” NASA said. “Sprawling over some 1,000 kilometers, with depths estimated at 300 meters, Kraken Mare is comparable in size to the Great Lakes and represents an opportunity for an unprecedented planetary exploration mission.”

The space agency first began talking about the submarine project last year. Scientists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, the Applied Physics Lab, and the Applied Research Lab prepared the video presentation for this month’s NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

“The mission concept we propose to study,” NASA said, “will investigate a full spectrum of oceanographic phenomena: chemical composition of the liquid, surface and subsurface currents, mixing and layering in the ‘water’ column, tides, wind and waves, bathymetry, and bottom features and composition.”

NASA is said to be contemplating a mission to send the submarine to Titan by 2040.

Book Review: Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History

In the name of Darwin, Marx, and the postmodern Inquisition

There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”

The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.

Mr. Weinberg reckons that the history of science is far too important to be left to the historians, and “To Explain the World” is the kind of thing that might tempt academic historians to lose their cool. They’d remind him that the great thinkers of 17th-century science commonly considered themselves to be reforming natural knowledge to be Christianity’s handmaid. Figures like Newton and Boyle discerned divine purpose throughout nature, and not, as Mr. Weinberg implies, just because they were taking an unfortunate detour from properly scientific behavior. What counts as “natural” and what as “super-natural” turns out to be historically variable. Historians might insist that “science” is not a self-evidently stable category: the practices called “natural philosophy,” “mathematics,” and “natural history,” for example, were thought to be very different types of knowledge, while the notion of “science” in the past simply designated some idea of systematic knowledge.

The historians might also thump the table, insisting that searching for anticipations and foreshadowings is both wrong and illogical—”ahistorical” as they’d say. They’d wonder that a history written by a working scientist should be so little concerned with the messy day-to-day practices of getting experiments to succeed, getting calculations right, and persuading others of their truth and accuracy. They’d express bemusement at Mr. Weinberg’s insistence that science advances by rejecting teleology, even as he depicts its history as a triumphal progress from dark past to bright present.

Table-thumping isn’t interesting—whoever does it. Mr. Weinberg identifies his account as a personal view, and there’s no reason why people shouldn’t want to know how an eminent modern scientist (and public intellectual) thinks about all sorts of things. What is interesting is that these different stories about the historical development of science persist, with no prospect that professional historians of science will ever own their subject as, say, art historians own the history of art. Science remains almost unique in that respect. It’s modernity’s reality-defining enterprise, a pattern of proper knowledge and of right thinking, in the same way that—though Mr. Weinberg will hate the allusion—Christian religion once defined what the world was like and what proper knowledge should be. The same circumstance that gives science its immense modern cultural prestige also ensures that there will be an audience for its idealization and celebration. “To Explain the World” is for that audience.

Racial Diversity Is Lacking At Some Of The Top Law Schools, Even Though Race Does Not Exist

The percentage of African-American and Hispanic students enrolled in law school increased between 2010 and 2013, but those gains came almost exclusively at less prestigious law schools with lower admission standards, according to new research.

“Schools that can ensure good career prospects aren’t making diversity a priority,” he said. “There seems to be much more of a focus on the [LSAT and grade-point average] numbers.”

Of the 36 elite law schools in Taylor’s analysis, 10 saw their proportion of minority students increase during the study period and 17 saw declines; the rest registered no statistically significant change. Contacted for comment, schools with declines, including the University of Virginia School of Law and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, did not respond.

“The legal profession will never be more diverse than the population of law students,” Smith said. “We need to build a more diverse profession—and it needs to start with law schools across the board.”

Darnell Smith, an African-American student at Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, said the interplay between racial diversity, law school admissions and school prestige is complex.

“The legal profession can benefit from more diversity,” Smith said. “Should those students only attend low-ranked law schools? Absolutely not. But I don't think low-ranked law schools should be blamed for giving students an opportunity.”

ZOG firebombs Dresden

On the evening of February 13th, 1945, ZOG began a devastating series of raids on the medieval German city of Dresden.

In two days, 1,200 RAF and USAAF bombers dropped 3,900 tons of explosives and incendiary bombs.

The fires consolidated into an inferno, suffocating people as the blaze sucked oxygen from the air.

It was not known at first how many people had perished in the devasting attack, with some estimates putting the loss of life at more than 100,000.

An official German report in 2010 concluded that up to 25,000 people, most of them civilians and refugees, were killed in the raids.

The ancient timber framed buildings in the historic centre were completely destroyed and eight square miles of the city were left in ruins. Among the buildings damaged were the 18th century Frauenkirche, the Semperoper opera house and the Zwinger Palace, all of which have now been rebuilt.

Critics claim there was no military justification for the destruction, but others argue that Dresden was an important supply centre for the Germans as they fought the approaching Soviet Army.

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THERE IS ONLY ONE RESPONSE:

What's REALLY happening in Ukraine and Syria?

EU meddling has helped bring full-scale war back to Europe. Nato-backed aggression by the Kiev junta is beaten back by ethnic Russian militia fighters. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, Islamist gangs become bolder by the day. 

As violence flares in Ukraine and on the streets of Western cities, Nick Griffin discusses what is really behind the trouble with Golden Dawn MEP General Georgios Epitideios and the Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF) President Roberto Fiore.

Rachel Corrie family statement on Israeli Supreme Court dismissal: ‘This decision amounts to judicial sanction of immunity for Israeli military forces’

Statement from Corrie family in response to the Israeli Supreme Court’s Dismissal of Appeal in Wrongful Death of Rachel Corrie

February 12, 2015

Today we received word from our attorneys that the Supreme Court of Israel dismissed our appeal in the wrongful death case of our daughter and sister Rachel Corrie.  Our family is disappointed but not surprised. We had hoped for a different outcome, though we have come to see through this experience how deeply all of Israel’s institutions are implicated in the impunity enjoyed by the Israeli military.

It will take some time before we have ability to read the decision in English and to process all the court has said. Nevertheless, it is clear that this decision, affirming the August 2012 lower court finding, amounts to judicial sanction of immunity for Israeli military forces when they commit injustices and human rights violations.

The Supreme Court decision ignores international law arguments regarding the protection of civilians and human rights defenders in armed conflict and grossly violates the internationally recognized right to effective remedy.

The court has determined that our separate case against Dr. Yehuda Hiss and Abu Kabir Institute, regarding inappropriate ways in which Rachel’s autopsy was conducted, may go forward in the lower court. We continue to be appalled that it requires a lawsuit to have a truthful accounting of what occurred, and complete repatriation of Rachel’s remains. Decisions as to next steps will be made by the family in consultation with our attorneys.

Despite the verdict, our family remains convinced we were correct in bringing this case forward.  The day after Rachel was killed, Prime Minister Sharon promised President Bush a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. Clearly, that standard was not met. The U.S. government continues to call for such an investigation by Israel.  A civil lawsuit cannot substitute for an impartial investigation, but it is the only process through which a family can discover more information and move forward when governments fail to act.

Rachel’s case provides yet another example of how the Israeli justice system is failing to provide accountability. We urge the international community, and not least the U.S. government, to stand with victims of human rights violations and against impunity, and to uphold fundamental tenants of international justice.

We are immensely grateful to our attorney Hussein Abu Hussein and to his entire legal team for the decade of work they have contributed to Rachel’s case, and continue to provide.  We are grateful to all of our friends in Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere, who in so many different ways have supported our efforts.

We have taken this path for Rachel, the daughter and sister we love, lost, and miss. Her spirit lives. She has inspired all of our actions and will continue to do so.

For the Supreme Court Decision (in Hebrew) see: http://elyon1.court.gov.il/files/12/820/069/v11/12069820.v11.pdf

For more information about the trial visit: http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/trial

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/statement-dismissal-judicial#sthash.yu1tWp2k.dpuf

Live bacterium depicted using X-ray laser

An international team led by Uppsala University scientists has succeeded, for the first time, in depicting intact live bacteria with an X-ray laser. This technique, now described in the journal Nature Communications, can give researchers a clearer understanding of the complex world of cells.

'If you really want to understand a cell's functions, it has to be alive,' says Professor Janos Hajdu of Uppsala University, one of the leading researchers responsible for the experiment.

The ultrashort pulses and high intensity of the X-ray laser permit such rapid data collection that an image of the cell is obtained before it disintegrates.

The method the researchers used in this experiment allows better resolution, in both time and space, than that obtained from the best optical microscope techniques. The new technique involves shooting a fine aerosol of cells with light pulses from an X-ray laser. This aerosol is literally a jet of living cells, thinner than a strand of hair. The ultrashort X-ray pulses spread outdiffract from individual cells, resulting in a distinct dispersion diffraction pattern that is registered by a high-speed detector. The data are then analysed with a computer programusing software developed in Uppsala, and images of the cells can be reconstructed.

X-rays destroy cells, but the ultrashort pulses and high intensity of the X-ray laser permit such rapid data collection that a correct image of the sample is obtained before it disintegrates. This technique, known as 'diffraction before destruction', has been shown previously to work with both organic and inorganic samples.

The experiment was performed with the X-ray laser of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, California. Two species of cyanobacteria, Cyanobium gracile and Synechococcus elongatus, were used in the study. The almost cylindrical shape of these cells emerges clearly in reconstruction from diffraction data.

According to Tomas Ekeberg, a molecular biophysicist at Uppsala University and leader of the experiment, the images could have been better still if it had been possible for the detectors to handle them the data better.

'To date, we've only managed to reconstruct cells with a resolution of 76 nanometres [= millionths of a millimetre], but the data we've collected show that we can get down to 4 nanometres. That means we might be able to distinguish individual proteins, which are of that size,' Ekeberg says.

The reason for the lower resolution, Ekeberg points out, is overexposure—exactly what happens when you take photographs in excessively bright light. In future experiments, it will be possible to correct this.

'We'll be able to get much higher resolution when we're able to use a filter to reduce the overexposure,' adds Gijs van der Schot, a PhD student and principal author of the publication.

Up to now, high-resolution depiction has involved freezing cells and giving them a high radiation dose that kills them during the data collection. The cells have also often been coated with a thin layer of metal to improve the contrast. Static images of cells also normally require long exposure times.

The research team's new method can show the structure of living cells, virtually instantaneously. Every image takes only a few femtoseconds (one femtosecond being a millionth billionth of a second). This kind of tool could help scientists gain a better grasp of hitherto unknown details of cell function and behaviour.

'Processes like cell division and protein folding could be observed in real time. The technique also makes possible future 3D modelling of processes in the cell, which could give us important insights into complicated disease progression,' Ekeberg explains.

The team is now planning to fine-tune the depiction method with further experiments, and hope to achieve images with a considerably higher resolution.

'There's a huge difference between images produced by means of this technique and those from traditional optical microscopy of living cells,' says Janos Hajdu.

'Few people thought this was feasible.'

Scientists get first glimpse of a chemical bond being born

Atoms forming a tentative bond, a moment captured for the first time in experiments with an X-ray laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The reactants are a carbon monoxide molecule, left, made of a carbon atom (black) and an oxygen atom (red), and a single atom of oxygen, just to the right of it. They are attached to the surface of a ruthenium catalyst, which holds them close to each other so they can react more easily. When hit with an optical laser pulse, the reactants vibrate and bump into each other, and the carbon atom forms a transitional bond with the lone oxygen, center. The resulting carbon dioxide molecule detaches and floats away, upper right. The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser probed the reaction as it proceeded and allowed the movie to be created.

Scientists have used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the first glimpse of the transition state where two atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to becoming a molecule.

This fundamental advance, reported Feb. 12 in Science Express and long thought impossible, will have a profound impact on the understanding of how chemical reactions take place and on efforts to design reactions that generate energy, create new products and fertilize crops more efficiently.

"This is the very core of all chemistry. It's what we consider a Holy Grail, because it controls chemical reactivity," said Anders Nilsson, a professor at the SLAC/Stanford SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis and at Stockholm University who led the research. "But because so few molecules inhabit this transition state at any given moment, no one thought we'd ever be able to see it."

Bright, Fast Laser Pulses Achieve the Impossible

The experiments took place at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Its brilliant, strobe-like X-ray laser pulses are short enough to illuminate atoms and molecules and fast enough to watch chemical reactions unfold in a way never possible before.

Researchers used LCLS to study the same reaction that neutralizes carbon monoxide (CO) from car exhaust in a catalytic converter. The reaction takes place on the surface of a catalyst, which grabs CO and oxygen atoms and holds them next to each other so they pair up more easily to form carbon dioxide.

In the SLAC experiments, researchers attached CO and oxygen atoms to the surface of a ruthenium catalyst and got reactions going with a pulse from an optical laser. The pulse heated the catalyst to 2,000 kelvins - more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit - and set the attached chemicals vibrating, greatly increasing the chance that they would knock into each other and connect.

The team was able to observe this process with X-ray laser pulses from LCLS, which detected changes in the arrangement of the atoms' electrons - subtle signs of bond formation - that occurred in mere femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second.

"First the oxygen atoms get activated, and a little later the carbon monoxide gets activated," Nilsson said. "They start to vibrate, move around a little bit. Then, after about a trillionth of a second, they start to collide and form these transition states."

'Rolling Marbles Uphill'

The researchers were surprised to see so many of the reactants enter the transition state - and equally surprised to discover that only a small fraction of them go on to form stable carbon dioxide. The rest break apart again.

"It's as if you are rolling marbles up a hill, and most of the marbles that make it to the top roll back down again," Nilsson said. "What we are seeing is that many attempts are made, but very few reactions continue to the final product. We have a lot to do to understand in detail what we have seen here."

Theory played a key role in the experiments, allowing the team to predict what would happen and get a good idea of what to look for. "This is a super-interesting avenue for theoretical chemists. It's going to open up a completely new field," said report co-author Frank Abild-Pedersen of SLAC and SUNCAT.

A team led by Associate Professor Henrik Öström at Stockholm University did initial studies of how to trigger the reactions with the optical laser. Theoretical spectra were computed under the leadership of Stockholm Professor Lars G.M. Pettersson, a longtime collaborator with Nilsson.

Preliminary experiments at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), another DOE Office of Science User Facility, also proved crucial. Led by SSRL's Hirohito Ogasawara and SUNCAT's Jerry LaRue, they measured the characteristics of the chemical reactants with an intense X-ray beam so researchers would be sure to identify everything correctly at the LCLS, where beam time is much more scarce. "Without SSRL this would not have worked," Nilsson said.

The team is already starting to measure transition states in other catalytic reactions that generate chemicals important to industry.

"This is extremely important, as it provides insight into the scientific basis for rules that allow us to design new catalysts," said SUNCAT Director and co-author Jens Nostrokerskov.

Five years of the sun in three minutes

On February 11, 2010, NASA launched its Solar Dynamics Observatory -- a spacecraft equipped with sensors, cameras and telescopes all with one mission: an in-depth examination of the star at the centre of our solar system -- the sun.

Since that time, the SDO has been capturing one image almost every second, providing an unprecedented level of insight into the sun's activity -- over 200 million images and 2,600 terabytes of data. Over 2,000 scientific papers have been published based on the observations of the SDO, and even today, it continues to send back vital and fascinating information about the sun.

Solar flares, coronal mass ejections, sunspots, eruptions; the imaging equipment on the observatory has allowed researchers to see how these evolve and what causes them. Photographs in different wavelengths have allowed researchers to study the sun's plasma, temperatures, magnetic fields and activity, and atmosphere and corona.

To celebrate the work that has been achieved thanks to the SDO, NASA has released two videos. The first is a timelapse, speeding up five years of SDO data into just under three minutes. The second, longer video is a showreel of highlights -- sunspots and CMEs and flares, in the various wavelengths that allow scientists to analyse the heat and light thereof.

"This mission has touched us on many levels; it evokes a sense of wonder when we see these beautiful images," said SDO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta. "It stokes our curiosity and it connects us personally to the deepest mysteries -- from the warmth we feel on our skin when we walk outside on a sunny day to the distant reaches of the cosmos."

Watch in HD for the best effect. Happy birthday, Solar Dynamics Observatory!

Astronomers catch multiple-star system in first stages of formation

Distant cloud of cosmic gas "caught in the act" of forming what may turn out to be a multiple star system, astronomers announce. Condensing filaments of gas could eventually create a triple-star system.

For the first time, astronomers have caught a multiple-star system in the beginning stages of its formation, and their direct observations of this process give strong support to one of several suggested pathways to producing such systems.

The scientists looked at a cloud of gas some 800 light-years from Earth, homing in on a core of gas that contains one young protostar and three dense condensations that they say will collapse into stars in the astronomically-short period of 40,000 years. Of the eventual four stars, the astronomers predict that three may become a stable triple-star system.

A triple star system forming within a dense gas filament in a numerical simulation modeling a group of forming stars. The color indicates the gas density, where lighter colors are higher densities. Rhe image is about 10,000 astronomical units across where the projected separations between the three objects is about 2,000 and 4,000 AU.

"Seeing such a multiple star system in its early stages of formation has been a longstanding challenge, but the combination of the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) has given us the first look at such a young system," said Jaime Pineda, of the Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, in Switzerland.

The scientists used the VLA and GBT, along with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii, to study a dense core of gas called Barnard 5 (B5) in a region where young stars are forming in the constellation Perseus. This object was known to contain one young forming star.

When the research team led by Pineda used the VLA to map radio emission from methane molecules, they discovered that filaments of gas in B5 are fragmenting, and the fragments are beginning to form into additional stars that will become a multiple-star system.

"We know that these stars eventually will form a multi-star system because our observations show that these gas condensations are gravitationally bound," Pineda said. "This is the first time we've been able to show that such a young system is gravitationally bound," he added.

"This provides fantastic evidence that fragmentation of gas filaments is a process that can produce multiple-star systems," Pineda said. Other proposed mechanisms include fragmentation of the main gas core, fragmentation within a disk of material orbiting a young star, and gravitational capture. "We've now convincingly added fragmentation of gas filaments to this list," Pineda added.

The condensations in B5 that will produce stars now range from one-tenth to more than one-third the mass of the Sun, the scientists said. Their separations will range from 3,000 to 11,000 times the Earth-Sun distance.

The astronomers analyzed the dynamics of the gas condensations and predict that, when they form into stars, they will form a stable system of an inner binary, orbited by a more-distant third star. The fourth star, they suggest, will not long remain part of the system.

Artist impression of the results. Left panel shows the star and three dense gas condensations system. Right panel shows the system after the stars are formed out of the condensations.

Nearly half of all stars are in multiple systems, but catching such systems at the very early stages of formation has been challenging. Thanks to the combination of the VLA and the GBT, we now have some important new insight into how multiple systems form. Our next step will be to look at other star-forming regions using the new capabilities of the VLA and of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile," Pineda said.

In addition to Pineda, the international research team included members from the U.S., the UK, Germany, and Chile. The astronomers reported their findings in the 12 February edition of the scientific journal Nature.

Egypt-Russia approach shows rejection of "US hegemony"

CAIRO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Besides their economic interests for both sides, the continuous closeness between Egypt and Russia and their growing strategic partnership indicate shared position on rejection of "U.S. hegemony."

Russian President Vladimir Putin started on Monday a two-day official visit to Cairo where he held talks with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on enhancing strategic partnership and boosting economic and military cooperation.

"The first message behind the visit is that both countries are dissatisfied with the U.S. hegemony over the world both politically and economically," said Nourhan al-Sheikh, political science professor at Cairo University and expert in Russian affairs.

The professor told Xinhua that Egyptian-Russian rejection of U.S. dominance is also indicated in Sisi's remarks on the necessity for "the establishment of a fairer international economic system."

Although Sisi did not mention the U.S. by name, the Egyptian president said on Tuesday in a joint press conference with Putin that the world needs to develop "an international system that is more democratic, fairer and safer for all countries."

Egypt has been facing U.S.-led Western criticism since then-military-chief Sisi led the overthrow of former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, whereas Russia has been suffering U.S. pressures and sanctions over the Ukrainian crisis.

Sheikh described Putin's visit to Cairo as "very supportive and earnest" as it shows Russia's confidence in Egypt's stability ahead of the country's long-awaited economic summit to be held in Sharm El-Sheikh in March to offer foreign investment opportunities in Egypt.

"This visit is like a Russian testimony that Egypt is stable, secure and trustworthy enough for strategic partnership and huge foreign investments," the professor added, noting that Cairo is Putin's first foreign visit in 2015.

As Russia's support is significant for Egypt in its "anti-terror war" and development aspirations, Russia also needs Egypt as the portal to maintain its interests in the Middle East and to help overcome the economic isolation attempts launched by the U.S..

Sisi and Putin agreed to establish a nuclear power plant in a coastal city in Egypt, an Egyptian-Russian free trade zone as well as a Russian industrial city near the Suez Canal corridor region.

"Russia would satisfy Egypt's needs for energy projects and weapon deals while Egypt would provide Russia with its needs of agricultural materials and other consumables affected by Western sanctions on Russia," the professor continued, "which explains how great their mutual interests are."

Putin said in Cairo on Tuesday that there are more than 400 Russian companies operating in Egypt and that three million Russian tourists visited Egypt in 2014, representing a 50 percent increase compared to 2013.

The annual volume of trade between Egypt and Russia has exceeded four billion U.S. dollars and it is expected to reach five billion dollars in the near future.

"The Russian-Egyptian decision to replace the dollar with their local currencies in their mutual trade is also part of their anti-U.S. hegemony policies," Abdel-Moneim Fawzi, head of diplomatic department at state-run Gomhuria newspaper, told Xinhua.

Fawzi noted that Russia has previously made this move with close allies like China and Thailand, which is seen as a Russian attempt "to shake the throne of the U.S. dollar."

According to the diplomatic expert, the Egyptian-Russian approach sends an important message that the structure of the international system cannot be "unipolar."

"For instance, unlike the United States, China is the world's second largest economy and it does not attempt to impose its will on other countries; the same applies to Russia," Fawzi illustrated.

Fawzi echoed Sheikh's view that Russia and Egypt have complementary interests and mutual needs for each other's political and economic support, "while the United States wants to tailor the world according to its visions and will."

The heads of states of Egypt and Russia also shared same positions on regional and international issues, including the necessity for reaching political solutions to the turmoil in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen, and on implementing the two-state solution to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Experts see that approaching Russia is part of Egypt's foreign policy to create a kind of balance in its relations with world powers in the West and the East through strengthening strategic partnership with influential states including Russia, China and Japan.

Egypt reaches free trade agreement with Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)

Egypt has reached a free trade zone agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union, which includes Russia, Armenia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, Egyptian President Sisi said at a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Cairo.

CAIRO (Sputnik) — Egypt has reached a free trade zone agreement with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi said Tuesday at a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

There was more than $4.5 billion of trade between Russia and Egypt in 2014, a more than 80 percent increase on the year before, said President Putin. Free trade agreement means that the markets of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia will be more easily accessible for Egyptian products and vice versa.

The EEU was established on May 29, 2014 by a treaty signed by Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Armenia joined the organization in October, and Kyrgyzstan signed its accession treaty in December. The union’s ultimate objective is to establish a single economic market stretching from the European Union to China, serving over 170 million people.

In a historic move, President Putin offered Egypt Russia's full-scale assistance in building the country’s first nuclear energy facility. “If the final agreements are reached, we will not only help building a nuclear power plant but will be able to assist [Egypt] in creating an entire nuclear power industry…including through training of personnel and help with scientific research," Putin said.

Egypt intends to build the Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant in the country’s north. The power plant is expected to have a capacity between 1,000 and 1,200 megawatts.

Also, the two countries' leaders discussed a broad range of international issues, including the Middle East peace process. "We have agreed on the need to maximize efforts to restore the negotiation process between Israelis and Palestinians on a two-state basis, with East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine," Sisi said.

According to the Egyptian president, the sides have also expressed the need to preserve the territorial integrity of Libya and Iraq, as well as the urgency for various political forces to reach a consensus.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin began his state visit to Egypt to boost bilateral ties with the Arab republic. Earlier in the day, the Russian leader said that the two countries were increasingly cooperating in such spheres as trade, nuclear energy, space, tourism and agriculture.

Bionic leaf: Researchers use bacteria to convert solar energy into liquid fuel

Sunlight on plant

Solar energy can be harnessed using electricity from photovoltaic cells to yield hydrogen that can be stored in fuel cells. But hydrogen has failed to catch on as a practical fuel for cars or for power. Converting solar energy into liquid fuel could accelerate its adoption as a power source.

Harvesting sunlight is a trick plants mastered more than a billion years ago, using solar energy to feed themselves from the air and water around them in the process we know as photosynthesis.

Scientists have also figured out how to harness solar energy, using electricity from photovoltaic cells to yield hydrogen that can be later used in fuel cells. But hydrogen has failed to catch on as a practical fuel for cars or for power generation in a world designed around liquid fuels.

Now scientists from a team spanning Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created a system that uses bacteria to convert solar energy into a liquid fuel. Their work integrates an "artificial leaf," which uses a catalyst to make sunlight split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a bacterium engineered to convert carbon dioxide plus hydrogen into the liquid fuel isopropanol.

The findings are published Feb. 9 in PNAS. The co-first authors are Joseph Torella, a recent PhD graduate from the HMS Department of Systems Biology, and Christopher Gagliardi, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Pamela Silver, the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at HMS and an author of the paper, calls the system a bionic leaf, a nod to the artificial leaf invented by the paper's senior author, Daniel Nocera, the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University.

"This is a proof of concept that you can have a way of harvesting solar energy and storing it in the form of a liquid fuel," said Silver, who is Core Faculty at the Wyss Institute. "Dan's formidable discovery of the catalyst really set this off, and we had a mission of wanting to interface some kinds of organisms with the harvesting of solar energy. It was a perfect match."

Silver and Nocera began collaborating two years ago, shortly after Nocera came to Harvard from MIT. They shared an interest in "personalized energy," or the concept of making energy locally, as opposed to the current system, which in the example of oil means production is centralized and then sent to gas stations. Local energy would be attractive in the developing world.

"It's not like we're trying to make some super-convoluted system," Silver said. "Instead, we are looking for simplicity and ease of use."

In a similar vein, Nocera's artificial leaf depends on catalysts made from materials that are inexpensive and readily accessible.

"The catalysts I made are extremely well adapted and compatible with the growth conditions you need for living organisms like a bacterium," Nocera said.

In their new system, once the artificial leaf produces oxygen and hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha. An enzyme takes the hydrogen back to protons and electrons, then combines them with carbon dioxide to replicate--making more cells.

Next, based on discoveries made earlier by Anthony Sinskey, professor of microbiology and of health sciences and technology at MIT, new pathways in the bacterium are metabolically engineered to make isopropanol.

"The advantage of interfacing the inorganic catalyst with biology is you have an unprecedented platform for chemical synthesis that you don't have with inorganic catalysts alone," said Brendan Colón, a graduate student in systems biology in the Silver lab and a co-author of the paper. "Solar-to-chemical production is the heart of this paper, and so far we've been using plants for that, but we are using the unprecedented ability of biology to make lots of compounds."

The same principles could be employed to produce drugs such as vitamins in small amounts, Silver said.

The team's immediate challenge is to increase the bionic leaf's ability to translate solar energy to biomass by optimizing the catalyst and the bacteria. Their goal is 5 percent efficiency, compared to nature's rate of 1 percent efficiency for photosynthesis to turn sunlight into biomass.

"We're almost at a 1 percent efficiency rate of converting sunlight into isopropanol," Nocera said. "There have been 2.6 billion years of evolution, and Pam and I working together a year and a half have already achieved the efficiency of photosynthesis."

Russia, Egypt May Exclude US Dollar And Use National Currencies In Bilateral Trade: Putin

Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi attend a welcoming ceremony onboard guided missile cruiser Moskva at the Black Sea port of Sochi on Aug. 12, 2014

Russia and Egypt may replace the U.S. dollar with their national currencies for settlement of accounts in bilateral trade, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with Egyptian media ahead of his visit to the country on Monday.

Putin told Egypt’s Al-Ahram daily newspaper that the issue of excluding the dollar in bilateral trade between Moscow and Cairo is “being actively discussed,” especially because the tourist season in Egypt is about to begin. According to the Russian leader, the use of national currencies -- ruble and Egyptian pound -- in settlement of accounts will help create more favorable conditions for Russian citizens who annually spend their holidays in Egypt.

“This measure will open up new prospects for trade and investment cooperation between our countries, reduce its dependence on the current trends in the world markets,” Putin told Al-Ahram, according to Kremlin. “I should note that we already use national currencies for trade with a number of the CIS States, and China. This practice proves its worth; we are ready to adopt it in our relations with Egypt as well. This issue is being discussed in substance by relevant agencies of both countries.”

According to Putin, the volume of bilateral trade between Moscow and Cairo in 2014 amounted to more than $4.5 billion, an increase of nearly 50 percent compared to the previous year. Russia provides about 40 percent of grain consumed in Egypt, while Cairo exports large amounts of fruit and vegetables to Moscow, he added.

“We see promising prospects in the field of high technology, particularly in the areas of nuclear energy, outer space use and sharing of the Russian GLONASS satellite navigation system,” Putin said.

Russia has also been pushing for a switch to national currencies in mutual payments with others countries, including China, India, Thailand and Turkey, RIA Novosti reported.

In September last year, Russia and China reportedly vowed to settle more bilateral trade in ruble and yuan, and improve cooperation between banks. In October, the two countries signed a three-year currency-swap line of 150 billion yuan ($24 billion), allowing Russia to borrow the yuan and lend the ruble, Bloomberg reported.

ZOG Repression in Greece: Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF) and Golden Dawn discussion in European Parliament

As news breaks of the forthcoming trial on trumped-up charges of Golden Dawn leaders, GD MEP Georgios Epitideios and Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF) President Roberto Fiore join Nick Griffin for a discussion about the assault on freedom and democracy in Greece.

The spy in your living room: Samsung smart TVs listen to everything you say, warns privacy policy

If the walls could talk, they'd probably chat with your Samsung Smart TV: The Internet-connected set may be listening in on users' personal conversations.

As first reported by The Daily Beast, Samsung's Smart TV privacy policy includes the following warning.

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition," the site says.

Those third parties, according to Samsung's policies, perform tasks like converting speech to text, while data collection helps the company improve its services, it said.

Voice-recognition data collection can be turned off via the settings menu, but "this may prevent you from using all of the Voice Recognition features," Samsung said.

Samsung unveiled its line of brainy TVs at CES 2012, but has made a few tweaks in the years since. In December 2013, alongside the new "finger gesture" function, the company boosted its voice interaction service, expanding it to 12 additional markets. Frequently used features like channel surfing, opening apps, and searching for shows or movies also got a lot easier. Want to check the score of yesterday's baseball game? Just ask the TV, and a pop-up results window will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Samsung did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment. A spokeswoman, however, told CNET that "Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously.

"In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers' personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use," she continued.

When activated (users will see a microphone icon on the screen), voice data consists of TV commands and search sentences only, the spokeswoman said. But the company does not retain voice data or sell it to third parties.

"If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a request voice command search," Samsung told CNET. "At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV."

Samsung's TVs are not the only devices that have an "always on" listening mode; gadgets like the Amazon Echo, Microsoft Xbox One, and Motorola Moto X have similar features.

You think there's a multiverse? Get real

Positing that alternative universes exist is just disguising our lack of knowledge of the cosmos. It's time to move on.

Prediction is difficult in a multiverse, taking us out of the realm of science.

COSMOLOGY is in crisis. Recent experiments have given us an increasingly precise narrative of the history of our universe, but attempts to interpret the data have led to a picture of a "preposterous universe" that eludes explanation in the terms familiar to scientists.

Everything we know suggests that the universe is unusual. It is flatter, smoother, larger and emptier than a "typical" universe predicted by the known laws of physics. If we reached into a hat filled with pieces of paper, each with the specifications of a possible universe written on it, it is exceedingly unlikely that we would get a universe anything like ours in one pick – or even a billion.

The challenge that cosmologists face is to make sense of this specialness. One approach to this question is inflation – the hypothesis that the early universe went through a phase of exponentially fast expansion. At first, inflation seemed to do the trick. A simple version of the idea gave correct predictions for the spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

But a closer look shows that we have just moved the problem further back in time. To make inflation happen at all requires us to fine-tune the initial conditions of the universe. And unless inflation is highly tuned and constrained, it leads to a runaway process of universe creation. As a result, some cosmologists suggest that there is not one universe, but an infinite number, with a huge variety of properties: the multiverse. There are an infinite number of universes in the collection that are like our universe and an infinite number that are not. But the ratio of infinity to infinity is undefined, and can be made into anything the theorist wants. Thus the multiverse theory has difficulty making any firm predictions and threatens to take us out of the realm of science.

These other universes are unobservable and because chance dictates the random distribution of properties across universes, positing the existence of a multiverse does not let us deduce anything about our universe beyond what we already know. As attractive as the idea may seem, it is basically a sleight of hand, which converts an explanatory failure into an apparent explanatory success. The success is empty because anything that might be observed about our universe could be explained as something that must, by chance, happen somewhere in the multiverse.

We started out trying to explain why the universe is so special, and we end up being asked to believe that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes with random properties. This makes me suspect that there is a basic but unexamined assumption about the laws of nature that must be overturned.

Cosmology has new questions to answer. Not just what are the laws, but why are these laws the laws? How were they chosen? We can't just hypothesise what the initial conditions were at the big bang, we need to explain those initial conditions. Thus we are in the position of a computer program asked to explain its inputs. It is clear that if we are to get anywhere, we need to invent new methods, and perhaps new kinds of laws, to gain a scientific description of the universe as a whole.

Physicist James Hartle has talked about the "excess baggage" that has to be left on the platform before we can board the train to further progress in cosmology. In work together with philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, we believe we have identified several of pieces of this baggage.

PARADIGM SHIFT: TRANSUDATIONISM

The first thing that must be discarded is the assumption that the same kind of laws that work on the scale of small subsystems of the world work, scaled up, at the level of the whole universe. We call this assumption the cosmological fallacy because it leads to a breakdown of predictability – as in the multiverse.

The second piece of excess baggage is the Newtonian paradigm, a method common to classical and quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is used to describe a subsystem of the universe, like a system studied in a laboratory, an atom or a star. This method depends on two elements: the set of possible initial configurations (or states) of the system and a law that specifies how the states change in time. Once we start the system off at an initial state, the law tells us what the state will be at later times. But if the laws and initial conditions are the inputs to the method, they cannot be its outputs too. If we want to understand why the laws hold and how the initial conditions of the universe are chosen, we need a new kind of law and methodology.

The Newtonian paradigm is ideal for describing systems in a laboratory but if we attempt to apply it to the universe, it explains both too little and too much. It fails to explain how the solution to the laws governing our universe is picked from the infinite number of solutions that don't govern anything. But it also predicts an infinite number of facts about an infinite number of non-existent universes. This is one of the reasons why the Newtonian paradigm cannot be applied to the universe as a whole.

These concepts illuminate why the multiverse fails as a scientific hypothesis in spite of the fact that simple versions of inflation made some predictions that have been confirmed. The idea of inflation is plagued by the need to explain how the initial conditions were chosen. This was done in the context of a methodology that only makes sense when applied to a subsystem of a larger system. When applied to the universe, it forced us to treat the universe as a subsystem of a much larger system: hence we had to invent the multiverse. And thus with an infinite ensemble of unobservable entities we leave the domain of science behind. In some sense, the multiverse embodies the unreal ensemble of all possible solutions to the laws of physics, imagined as elements of an invented ensemble of bubble universes. But this just trades one imaginary, unreal ensemble for another.

Once we accept that we need a new paradigm to do science at the level of the universe as a whole, the next question to ask is what principle that new paradigm should be founded on. This is a question we hope to provoke cosmologists to think about. Mangabeira Unger and I propose three principles, which we argue are necessary to underlie any theory capable of explaining big cosmological questions – like the selection of the laws and initial conditions of the universe – in a way that is open to experimental test.

The first is that there is just one universe. The second is that time is real and the laws of nature are not timeless but evolve. The third is that mathematics is not a description of some separate timeless, Platonic reality, but is a description of the properties of one universe.

These principles take us beyond the Newtonian paradigm and the cosmological fallacy, and are a starting point for exploring the science of the universe as a whole.

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

I know I am, but what are you?

Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots.

It would be poetic – albeit deeply frustrating – were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more – since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet there’s no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that we’d found it.

The entire article can be accessed here.

Unipolar world unacceptable to Russia: Putin

MOSCOW, Feb. 7 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that his country will never accept a unipolar world.

Noting that there is one "undisputed" unipolar leadership trying to control the current world and force others to obey, Putin said Russia would never accept such attempts.

At the congress of Russia's Federation of Independent Trade Unions, Putin stressed that Russia does not intend to be at war with anyone and is always willing to cooperate.

He reiterated that sanctions against Russia would never have the desired effect, although they do have a negative impact on the country's economy.

"We must realize this, and make all possible efforts to strengthen our sovereignty, including in the economic sphere," Putin said in a statement posted online, pledging Russia's firm stance against external pressure which was imposed on the country over Ukraine crisis.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday told the on-going 51st Munich Security Conference that Washington would continue to provide Ukraine with security assistance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is present at the conference, reiterated that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military buildup near the Russian borders is fueling up confrontation and undermining European security.

"Lavrov stressed that NATO support of Kiev's military action in southern Ukraine hampers attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the deep domestic crisis in Ukraine," said an online statement released by the ministry.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg responded by saying that all the measures taken by NATO were defensive and promised to maintain an open dialogue channel with Moscow.

Defense ministers of the NATO decided on Thursday to strengthen the alliance's presence in eastern Europe and the Baltic region and expand the size of its rapid reaction force to 30,000.

New interactive map of Milky Way lets you see the light

If you've got a few extra minutes, this short video is a great explanation of how Planck did its thing during its mission

From 2009 to late 2013, the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft revolved around our planet while using its telescope to soak up relic radiation from the Big Seed known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. Its goal, in effect, was to look back in time to just about 370,000 years after the Big Seed.

Now NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), which worked closely with the ESA on the Planck mission, has released a captivating interactive map of the Milky Way using Planck's data. It combines multiple views of our galaxy, including mapping dust, carbon monoxide gas, magnetic fields and a type of radiation known as "free-free." This kind of radiation happens when "isolated electrons and protons careen past one another in a series of near collisions, slowing down but continuing on their own way," according to the JPL.

"The towers of fiery colors are actually dust in the galaxy and beyond that has been polarized," the JPL says of this recently released map of the universe. It shows light in the 353GHz range, wavelengths longer than our eyes can see.

You can swoop through the map and set it to show different characteristics of the Milky Way on the Planck website here.

"The cosmic microwave background light is a traveler from far away and long ago," Charles Lawrence, the US project scientist for the mission at NASA's JPL, said in a statement. "When it arrives, it tells us about the whole history of our universe."

To study the CMB, Planck team members needed to remove the light from our galaxy, much of which is the same wavelength as the relic radiation. The team then used that removed light to create the new map. "Light generated from within our galaxy, the same light subtracted from the ancient signal, comes to life gloriously in the new image," the JPL says. "Gas, dust and magnetic field lines make up a frenzy of activity that shapes how stars form."

The map (top) is made up of several different views of the Milky Way: Dust Glow (upper left); Carbon Monoxide Gas (upper right); Carbon Monoxide Gas (upper right); and Magnetic Fields (lower right).

Not only was the space agency able to create the map thanks to the Planck mission, but by analyzing data sent back from the mission the team also discovered a few other things.

First, it was once believed that the Dark Ages of our universe -- a time before stars began winking into existence -- lasted for 300 million to 400 million years after the Big Seed. Looking at the Planck data, however, researchers now believe that the period of darkness lasted for about 550 million years.

Even more compelling was a revelation about dark energy, an as-yet-unproven force that scientists believe is responsible for the accelerating speed of the universe's expansion. "The Planck data also support the idea that the mysterious force known as dark energy is acting against gravity to push our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds," the JPL said.

The Planck team will continue analyzing the data, and it's expected that more insights about the origin and nature of our universe will be published next year. "The kind of questions we ask now we never would have thought possible to even ask decades ago, long before Planck," said James Bartlett, a US Planck team member from JPL.

Good news about exoplanets: What it means for the Peoples of mankind

Planets continue to make the news in new ways all the time. And with almost every finding that some observatory or institution announces to the public, there comes the obligatory comment on what this might mean for life in the universe. Most of these comments are brief and simplistic. But we shouldn’t become jaded; this is a real and important topic, and it becomes more overwhelmingly important to the human future the farther into the future you care to look.

Two exoplanet findings that were announced in the last two weeks are either good or bad news for mankind, depending on how you think. On the one hand they are genuinely positive for how abundant living worlds may be throughout the universe.

On the other hand, one of them in particular is profoundly unsettling in what it hints about our own future.

The first finding was theoretical, worked out by modeling the interactions of suns with their planets in extreme circumstances. The suns in question are red-dwarf stars, the dimmest and most abundant stars in the cosmos.

They’re dim enough that planets would have to huddle close to them to receive comfortable, liquid-water warmth. Fortunately, this is what the planets of such small, low-mass stars tend to do.

The catch: a world orbiting so close to a red-dwarf star should have its atmosphere stripped away by the outbursts and flares that happen early in such a star’s life.

But nature leaves a way to get through this fix, Rodrigo Luger and Rory Barnes of the University of Washington reported on Jan. 28.

A planet that starts off more like Neptune than Earth — that is, a massive body that’s mostly atmosphere — can have most but not all of its gas stripped away by the young red dwarf, leaving a world parked in the right place that’s more or less a good Earth.

The idea may sound simple, but the details were a bear. Such a lucky outcome might be unusual, but there are so many red dwarfs swarming among the brighter stars, and so many of them are proving to have exo-Neptunes, that the sheer numbers make the scenario look good.

If we ever get a radio wake-up call from another civilization, this is the kind of world it may come from.

The wings of the owl of Minerva

The Path of the Upward Spiral

The other news, released on Jan. 27, is more sobering. It too deals with the worlds of a dwarf star. Yale planet hunters Sarbani Basu and Debra Fischer untangled the signs of five planets, all roughly Earth-size, periodically crossing the face of the star Kepler-444. We observe this happening by a stroke of luck: their orbits appear exactly edge-on from Earth’s point of view.

Other exo-solar systems like this were already known. The remarkable thing about this one is the age of the star: 11.2 billion years. That’s much older than our 4.6-billion-year-old sun and solar system. Kepler-444 and its planets formed when the universe was less than 20 percent of its present age.

Astronomers had not known that rocky, Earth-like planets could form so early in cosmic history. The heavy elements that make up the bulk of a good world — iron, silicon, oxygen, magnesium, and other rock-forming elements — accumulated in the universe only gradually.

They emerge only from the smoke and ashes of dead stars that cooked them up from hydrogen in their nuclearreactor interiors. Material from the early universe is quite deficient in such elements. But clearly now, there was enough to make rocky planets anyway.

In fact, astronomers estimate that a majority of the Earths in the Milky Way have a billion or two years’ head start on us.

Why is this so sobering for our future? Because it removes what used to be a tidy explanation for a troubling mystery. If the universe is full of life-friendly planets, and if life often evolves to intelligence and space travel as it has done here, the mystery is why aren’t we already overrun with waves of aliens? Since ages and ages ago? One theory was that we’re among the first; others haven’t had time yet to evolve and spread very far. But now that explanation is shot to pieces.

The fact that Earth hasn’t been a constant busy alien spaceport since the Precambrian Era is an aspect of the Fermi Paradox, named for the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, who in 1950 pointedly asked, “Where are they?”

Clearly, something prevents the development of abundant advanced life that builds interstellar spacecraft. And we don’t know what it is.

Will it apply to us?

Russia tests new weapons in Ukraine

A rebel Strela-10 air defence system on the streets of Donetsk

Eastern Ukraine has become a testing ground for Russia's new military capabilities.

When Russia last went to war, in Georgia in 2008, it looked like an easy victory. But Russia's generals were deeply concerned at how badly their forces performed in some key areas of modern warfare.

Russia has spent the seven years since then rearming, re-equipping, and retraining, in order to deal with those deficiencies, and to try to close the capability gap with modern Western armies.

Now the results can be seen in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists have gained ground against Ukrainian government troops.

Hi-tech electronics

Ukraine's army has not gone through the same intensive modernisation process, and is suffering the effects, facing the newer weapons and systems supplied by Russia.

Two key examples are the use of UAVs (drones) for surveillance and targeting, and the use of electronic warfare.

Both technologies were identified as areas of weakness in the Russian forces in 2008, and both have been intensively developed since. Now, they are in widespread use in eastern Ukraine, placing Ukrainian government forces at a strong disadvantage.

Here a rebel Grad rocket system is deployed at a cemetery

Ukrainian forces are short of secure communications systems. The result is that their communications are both subject to jamming, and often also show their location to Russian direction-finding equipment. This can lead to being swiftly targeted by Russian artillery, including Grad and other, more powerful, rocket systems.

As part of the non-lethal aid provided by the US, Ukraine has received special radar to try to pinpoint the source of incoming mortar fire. But their use is limited by the difficulty in communicating the results to other forces.

And, for the time being, Ukraine has not received the more sophisticated systems that would pinpoint the source of fire from longer-range artillery systems.

Tanks and missiles

Ukrainian forces are also outclassed by the tanks arriving from Russia. Not only are these more modern than Ukrainian models, but Ukraine is also short of effective anti-armour weapons in working order.

All of these systems, plus medical support and field hospital equipment, are on the list of Ukrainian requests for support, to increase the survivability of their forces when confronting new Russian military equipment.

Losses of Ukrainian aircraft over the conflict zone show how well-equipped the Russian-backed separatists are for air defence. This includes not just the Buk missile system - blamed for downing Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 - but also others like Strela for use at lower altitudes and shorter ranges, and a wide range of lighter, shoulder-launched missiles.

Independent experts, as well as Nato, Western leaders and the Kiev government, say there is clear evidence of direct Russian military involvement, despite Russian denials.

As part of its military transformation process, Russia has been practising for conflict with an intensive programme of exercises and manoeuvres, involving tens of thousands of servicemen across the country.

These exercises have been increasing in size and complexity, and often have a storyline which is directly hostile to the West.

Now, in addition, Russia has the benefit of a live testing ground in eastern Ukraine, where it can try out its new weapons, systems and tactics. The results - especially if all of these are tested against any potential new US defensive systems supplied to Ukraine - will help Russia assess how its forces would fare in a direct confrontation with Nato.