Meteor Blast 'Something We Only Saw in Movies'

A day after a massive meteor exploded over this city in central Russia, a monumental cleanup effort is under way.

Authorities have deployed around 24,000 troops and emergencies responders to help in the effort.

Officials say more than a million square feet of windows -- the size of about 20 football fields -- were shattered by the shockwave from the meteor's blast. Around 4,000 buildings in the area were damaged.

The injury toll climbed steadily on Friday. Authorities said today it now stands at more than 1,200. Most of those injuries were from broken glass, and only a few hundred required hospitalization.

According to NASA, this was the biggest meteor to hit Earth in more than a century. Preliminary figures suggest it was 50 feet wide and weighed more than the Eiffel Tower.

SEE PHOTOS: Meteorite Crashes in Russia

NASA scientists have also estimated the force of the blast that occurred when the meteor fractured upon entering Earth's atmosphere was approximately 470 kilotons -- the equivalent of about 30 Hiroshima bombs.

Residents said today they still can't believe it happened here.

"It was something we only saw in the movies," one university student said. "We never thought we would see it ourselves."

Throughout the city, the streets are littered with broken glass. Local officials have announced an ambitious pledge to replace all the broken windows within a week. In the early morning hours, however, workers could still be heard drilling new windows into place.

Authorities have sent divers into a frozen lake outside the city, where a large chunk of the meteor is believed to have landed, creating a large hole in the ice. By the end of the day they had not found anything.

They are not the only ones looking for it.

Meteor hunters from around the world are salivating at what some are calling the opportunity of a lifetime. A small piece of the meteor could fetch thousands of dollars and larger chunks could bring in even hundreds of thousands.

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False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

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Football: Balotelli secures victory for AC Milan

MILAN: A late strike from Mario Balotelli was enough to secure a 2-1 victory for Milan over Parma and a jump up to fourth place in Italy's Serie A on Friday.

Milan, who host Barcelona in the first leg of their Champions League last 16 tie next week, took a 39th-minute lead when Argentine defender Gabriel Paletta put into his own net.

Massimiliano Allegri's side virtually secured all three points when Balotelli scored from a freekick in the 78th minute.

Parma came fighting back in the dying minutes and were rewarded when Nicola Sansone beat Cristian Abbiati in the Milan net from Biabiany's delivery on the right.

However, it was too little too late for Roberto Donadoni's men, who remain 10th on 32 points.

Milan's 13th win of the campaign moved them up one place to fourth at the expense of city rivals Inter, who have a tough away trip to Fiorentina on Sunday.

Juventus, with a five-point lead on Napoli, are away to Roma on Saturday.

- AFP/fa

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Report: Google to open U.S. retail stores later this year

Google Chrome Zone section of PC World on London's Tottenham Court Road.

(Credit:
CNET Crave U.K.)

Google plans to open its own retail stores across the United States, according to a new report, giving the increasingly hardware-focused company a place to show off its growing number of physical products.

Citing "an extremely reliable source," 9to5Google says the company "hopes to have the first flagship Google Stores open for the holidays in major metropolitan areas."

The report says Google accelerated plans to build physical stores because customers are unlikely to buy expensive hardware, including the upcoming Google Glass, without first having a chance to try it for free.

Google already has set up Chrome mini-stores inside U.S. Best Buy locations and electronic retailers in the United Kingdom. From the start, those stores have prompted speculation that Google will open a full-scale retail presence. Google Stores could help bolster the company's brand image, showcase new products and win over
Android skeptics.

Still, Google is on the record denying any move into retail. In December, Google Shopping head Sameer Samat told All Things D that the company "had no aspirations to open a store."

"We aren't planning on being a retailer," he said. "We don't view being a retailer right now as the right decision."

CNET has contacted Google for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

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Carnival Cruise Ship Hit With First Lawsuit

The first lawsuit against Carnival Cruise Lines has been filed and it is expected to be the beginning of a wave of lawsuits against the ship's owners.

Cassie Terry, 25, of Brazoria County, Texas, filed a lawsuit today in Miami federal court, calling the disabled Triumph cruise ship "a floating hell."

"Plaintiff was forced to endure unbearable and horrendous odors on the filthy and disabled vessel, and wade through human feces in order to reach food lines where the wait was counted in hours, only to receive rations of spoiled food," according to the lawsuit, obtained by ABCNews.com. "Plaintiff was forced to subsist for days in a floating toilet, a floating Petri dish, a floating hell."

Click Here for Photos of the Stranded Ship at Sea

The filing also said that during the "horrifying and excruciating tow back to the United States," the ship tilted several times "causing human waste to spill out of non-functioning toilets, flood across the vessel's floors and halls, and drip down the vessel's walls."

Terry's attorney Brent Allison told ABCNews.com that Terry knew she wanted to sue before she even got off the boat. When she was able to reach her husband, she told her husband and he contacted the attorneys.

Allison said Terry is thankful to be home with her husband, but is not feeling well and is going to a doctor.

Carnival's Triumph Passengers: 'We Were Homeless' Watch Video

Girl Disembarks Cruise Ship, Kisses the Ground Watch Video

Carnival Cruise Ship Passengers Line Up for Food Watch Video

"She's nauseated and actually has a fever," Allison said.

Terry is suing for breach of maritime contract, negligence, negligent misrepresentation and fraud as a result of the "unseaworthy, unsafe, unsanitary, and generally despicable conditions" on the crippled cruise ship.

"Plaintiff feared for her life and safety, under constant threat of contracting serious illness by the raw sewage filling the vessel, and suffering actual or some bodily injury," the lawsuit says.

Despite having their feet back on solid ground and making their way home, many passengers from the cruise ship are still fuming over their five days of squalor on the stricken ship and the cruise ship company is likely to be hit with a wave of lawsuits.

"I think people are going to file suits and rightly so," maritime trial attorney John Hickey told ABCNews.com. "I think, frankly, that the conduct of Carnival has been outrageous from the get-go."

Hickey, a Miami-based attorney, said his firm has already received "quite a few" inquiries from passengers who just got off the ship early this morning.

"What you have here is a) negligence on the part of Carnival and b) you have them, the passengers, being exposed to the risk of actual physical injury," Hickey said.

The attorney said that whether passengers can recover monetary compensation will depend on maritime law and the 15-pages of legal "gobbledygook," as Hickey described it, that passengers signed before boarding, but "nobody really agrees to."

One of the ticket conditions is that class action lawsuits are not allowed, but Hickey said there is a possibility that could be voided when all the conditions of the situation are taken into account.

One of the passengers already thinking about legal action is Tammy Hilley, a mother of two, who was on a girl's getaway with her two friends when a fire in the ship's engine room disabled the vessel's propulsion system and knocked out most of its power.

"I think that's a direction that our families will talk about, consider and see what's right for us," Hilley told "Good Morning America" when asked if she would be seeking legal action.

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Sand-grain-sized drum extends reach of quantum theory

The banging of a tiny drum heralds the intrusion of the weird world of quantum mechanics into our everyday experience. Though no bigger than a grain of sand, the drum is the largest object ever to have been caught obeying the uncertainty principle, a central idea in quantum theory.

As well as extending the observed reach of quantum theory, the finding could complicate the hunt for elusive gravitational waves : it suggests that the infinitesimal motion caused by these still-hypothetical ripples in spacetime could be overwhelmed by quantum effects.

The uncertainty principle says that you cannot simultaneously determine both a particle's exact position and momentum. For example, bouncing a photon off an electron will tell you where it is, but it will also change the electron's motion, creating fresh uncertainty in its speed.

This idea limits our ability to measure the properties of very small objects, such as electrons and atoms. The principle should also apply to everyday, macroscopic objects, but this has not been tested – for larger objects, the principle's effects tend to be swamped by other uncertainties in measurement, due to random noise, say.

Quantum drum

To extend the known reach of the uncertainty principle, Tom Purdy and colleagues of the University of Colorado, Boulder, created a drum by tightly stretching a 40-nanometre-thick sheet of silicon nitride over a square frame with sides of half a millimetre – about the width of a grain of sand. They placed the drum inside a vacuum chamber cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, minimising any interference by random noise.

By continuously firing a stream of photons at the drum they were able to get increasingly precise measurements of the position of the skin at any moment. However, this also caused the skin to vibrate at an unknown speed. When they attempted to determine its momentum, the error in their measurement had increased – just as the uncertainty principle predicts.

"You don't usually have to think about quantum mechanics for objects you can hold in your hand," says Purdy.

That the uncertainty principle holds sway at such a large scale could affect the hunt for gravitational waves, which are predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity but have never been detected.

Mitigation strategy

Gravitational wave detectors look for very slight changes in the distance between two test masses caused by passing spacetime ripples. Purdy says his team's experiment confirms long-held suspicions that quantum uncertainty could overwhelm these very small changes.

Now he and others can use the drum to explore more advanced measurement techniques to mitigate the effects. For example, uncertainty in an object's momentum could lead to future uncertainty in its position and there should be ways to minimise such knock-on effects. "You can't avoid the uncertainty principle, but you can in some clever ways make it [such that] increasing the momentum doesn't add back to the uncertainty in position at a later time," says Purdy.

His experiment is a neat demonstration of the breakdown of the traditional notion that the atomic world is quantum while the macroscopic world is classic, says Gerard Milburn of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved in the work. Previous, attempts to blur the quantum-classical divide have involved entangling diamonds and demonstrating quantum superposition in a strip of metal.

Despite these feats, Milburn doesn't rule out the prospect of a breakdown on really large scales. "Of course maybe one day we will see quantum mechanics fail at some scale. Testing it to destruction is a good motivation for going down this path," he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1231282

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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US, UN urge Iran to ensure 'progress' at talks

WASHINGTON: Top US and EU leaders urged Iran on Thursday to help ensure "progress" in the next round of talks over its nuclear program, even as moves to boost UN inspections of Iranian sites failed.

US Secretary of State John Kerry cautioned the next negotiations, due on February 26 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, "can only make progress if the Iranians come to the table determined to make and discuss real offers."

And he warned as he met with UN chief Ban Ki-moon that the United States was determined not to get trapped in "a delay-after-delay process."

"Countries that have peaceful programs do not have problems proving to people that they are peaceful," Kerry told reporters.

"I think it is incumbent on the Iranians to prove that they are prepared to meet our willingness... to be open to a diplomatic resolution."

It took weeks of negotiations to agree on a date and venue for the next talks aimed at getting Tehran to rein in its nuclear enrichment program between the world powers, known as the P5+1, and Iran.

Ban also expressed hope that the P5+1 meetings would "bring fruitful progress."

And EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who met with Kerry separately Thursday at the State Department, said: "I always look for success... and I will do my best on behalf of the P5+1."

"It is important that we continue to track and make our efforts successful," she said.

But the chief UN atomic inspector said Thursday that separate talks with Iran had failed again to agree on enhanced inspections of its nuclear program.

"We had discussions on the structured approach document but could not finalize the document," Herman Nackaerts of the International Atomic Energy Agency told reporters after returning from Tehran.

"We will work hard now to resolve the remaining differences, but time is needed to reflect on the way forward."

- AFP/jc

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FDA approves bionic eye for adults with rare genetic disease

The system includes an eyeglass-mounted camera and a tiny antenna and electrode array surgically implanted onto the retina.

(Credit:
Second Sight Medical)

For most of us, light-sensitive cells that line our retinas convert light rays into electrical impulses that travel through the optic nerve to the brain to be assembled into images. But for an estimated 1 in 4,000 people in the U.S. with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, those cells are damaged, which most commonly impairs vision at night. What's more, treatment to prevent eventual (if unlikely) total blindness remains elusive.

Enter the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, which the FDA approved today to treat a very specific population: adults 25 and older with severe to profound RP who have bare or no light perception in both eyes but inner layer retinal function and a history of the ability to see forms.

Though the bionic eye doesn't restore vision to these patients, it could allow them to detect light and dark, which in turn could help them identify the movement or location of objects.

"This new surgically implanted assistive device provides an option for patients who have lost their sight to RP, for whom there have been no FDA-approved treatments," Jeffrey Shuren, M.D., director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a news release. "The device may help adults with RP who have lost the ability to perceive shapes and movement to be more mobile and to perform day-to-day activities."

The system works via an array of electrodes implanted onto the retina, which transform images transmitted wirelessly from an eyeglass-mounted video camera into electrical impulses that stimulate the retina to produce images.

The FDA says it reviewed data from a clinical study of 30 patients with RP who were equipped with the Argus II and monitored for at least two years after receiving the implant.

After implant surgery, 19 of the 30 participants reported no adverse events related to the surgery or device, while 11 reported a total of 23 adverse events, including inflammation, retinal detachment, and the opening of a wound along the surgical suture.

The FDA is categorizing the system as a humanitarian use device, meaning there is a "reasonable assurance" that the device is safe and its "probable benefit outweighs the risk of illness or injury."

Most participants reported that they were able to perform basic activities better with the Argus II than without it, ranging from detecting the direction of a motion, detecting street curbs, walking on a sidwalk without stepping off, and matching black, gray, and white socks.

Three government organizations -- the Department of Energy, the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation -- provided grant funding of more than $100 million as well as other basic research for the project.

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Ship Overcomes Towing Issues, Inches Closer to Port

The agonizingly slow progress of the stricken Carnival Triumph cruise ship carrying 4,000 passengers and crew was further delayed today by problems with the tug boats towing it in, meaning exhausted passengers may not get off the ship until nearly dawn.

The ship is now expected in port between 9:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. CT, according to Carnival. It could take up to five more hours to get everybody off the huge ship.

"There are some limitations. We know that up front," Carnival Cruise Senior Vice President of Marketing Terry Thornton said at a news conference this afternoon. "The ship still does not have power. We only have one functioning elevator aboard."

Thornton said that anyone with special needs and children will be the first to get off the boat. He said the company's number one priority is to make the process as "quick, efficient and comfortable" for guests as possible.

"We're not anticipating any additional difficulties," he said.

Click here for photos of the stranded ship at sea.

The passengers were achingly close to port about noon today as the ship began to enter the channel and proceed to the cruise terminal. At 1 p.m., the lead tow boat had a tow gear break, so a spare tug boat that was on standby had to be sent in to replace it.

But once the second tug was in position and the lines were re-set, the towing resumed only briefly before the tow line snapped.

"We had to replace that tow line so the ship did not begin progressing back into the cruise terminal until 2 p.m.," Thornton said

Stranded Carnival Cruise Ship On Its Way to Port Watch Video

Carnival Cancels All Scheduled Voyages Aboard the Triumph Watch Video

Carnival Cruise Ship Making Its Way to Port Watch Video

Passengers desperate to get off the vessel waved at media helicopters that flew out to film the ship and passenger Rob Mowlam told ABCNews.com by phone today that most of the passengers on board were "really upbeat and positive."

Nevertheless, when he gets off Mowlam said, "I will probably flush the toilet 10 times just because I can."

Mowlam, 37, got married on board the Triumph Friday and said he and his wife, Stephanie Stevenson, 27, haven't yet thought of redoing the honeymoon other than to say, "It won't be a cruise."

Alabama State Port Authority Director Jimmy Lyons said that with powerless "dead ships" like the Triumph, it is usually safer to bring them in during daylight hours, but, "Once they make the initial effort to come into the channel, there's no turning back."

"There are issues regarding coming into the ship channel and docking at night because the ship has no power and there's safety issues there," Richard Tillman of the Mobile Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau told ABCNews.com.

When asked if the ship could be disembarked in the dark of night, Tillman said, "It is not advised. It would be very unusual."

Thornton denied the rumors that there was a fatality on the ship. He said that there was one illness early on, a dialysis patient, but that passenger was removed from the vessel and transferred to a medical facility.

The U.S. Coast Guard is assisting now and there are multiple generators on board. And customs officials will board the ship while it is being piloted to port to accelerate the embarkation, officials said.

After eight miserable days at sea, the ship's owners have increased the compensation for what some on board are calling the vacation from hell.

All 3,143 passengers aboard the 900 foot colossus, which stalled in the Gulf of Mexico after an engine room fire early Sunday, were already being given a full refund for the cruise, transportation expenses and vouchers for a another cruise. Carnival Cruise Lines is now boosting that offer to include another $500 per person. Gerry Cahill, president and CEO of Carnival Cruise Lines, announced the additional compensation Wednesday.

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Water wars loom as the US runs dry

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