Information about Business And Finance, Cars And Transportation And More

A strong storm system was producing wet weather over the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest early Tuesday, while rain was slated for the Pacific Northwest and mid-Atlantic states.

The Dakotas will see a few inches of snow during the day, while parts of northern Minnesota can expect either snow showers or a mix of rain and snow showers.

Southern Minnesota, along with northern Iowa and parts of Wisconsin, can expect rain that will change over to snow in the evening in some areas. Windy conditions were anticipated across the Northern Plains and the Upper Midwest.

Showers and thunderstorms were forecast across most of the Mississippi Valley and the Southern Plains. There is the potential for damaging winds and heavy rain across the Mississippi Valley and the Southern Plains.

In the East, areas of rain were anticipated across the mid-Atlantic states, while a mix of rain, sleet and snow will move through New England.

A new storm system will begin to make its way over the Pacific Northwest. A heavy batch of rain was anticipated along the coastline, while areas farther inland can expect minor snow accumulations.

Across the Southwest, high pressure will keep southern California and parts of Nevada mostly clear, while clouds and snow showers were forecast for the Four Corners region.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Monday ranged from a low of minus 16 degrees at Clayton Lake, Maine, to a high of 85 degrees at Weslaco, Texas.

Not taking any chances after the 26/11 terror strikes in Mumbai, multinational companies, embassies and UN bodies are independently reviewing security of luxury hotels before making reservations for their high-profile clients in India.

Security experts posted in embassies here and UN organisations are preparing similar reports to ensure maximum safety of their officials and guests.

‘After the attack, especially on Trident and Taj hotels, many representatives, especially from Bangalore, came to check our security measures. Not just them but even officials from the US embassy, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other multilateral bodies conducted a similar survey in our hotel,’ said Akhil Mathur, spokesman of the Le Meridien hotel here.

‘Many were concerned about exit routes in the event of an emergency and of the safety measures in place for guests in the hotel. Since we have paid enough attention and tightened our security further, they were pleased,’ Mathur added.

Industry and intelligence sources told IANS that this is the first time that security heads and representatives of various multinational organisations have undertaken such a task of preparing independent reports detailing ’secure’ and ’safe’ hotels across the country.

‘One of the reasons why some high-profile guests or VIPs do not stay in the Oberoi or The Lalit is because their escape routes are not satisfactory. There is a flyover across the road which many consider an impediment in the event of an emergency,’ said a top hotelier.

Work is under way to prepare a list of luxury hotels where top corporate honchos who often travel to India for business meetings can be put up without risk to their lives.

‘We took this painstaking exercise in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack,’ a security head of an international bank, which has 3,000 employees on its rolls, told IANS.

‘Fortunately our board of directors and senior management had left the Taj and the Oberoi hotels just minutes before the militants stormed the hotels and began firing indiscriminately.’

On Nov 26, a 10-member suicide squad, allegedly belonging to the Lashker-e-Taiba, attacked the Taj Mahal Hotel near the landmark Gateway of India and the nearby Oberoi-Trident hotel among a host of other spots in south Mumbai.

At least 170 people, including 22 foreigners were killed. The hotels suffered extensive damage.

‘Foreigners were obviously scared after the attacks. Some visiting India have gone the extra mile to do reconnaissance missions of hotels for sheer safety,’ said a UN official.

One particular security head working in an MNC, who did not wanted to be named, said he had personally visited and reviewed security of at least 40 hotels all across the country.

‘During my visits, I checked their contingency plans and level of alertness. To my satisfaction I found each and every hotel either had hired security consultants or were in the process of hiring them.’

Many hotels in the country are spending huge amounts to install state-of-the-art gadgets and hi-tech equipment for ramping up security in their premises.

Bitter cold kept its grip on the Northeast on Saturday, while warmer temperatures brought relief to the Midwest and Southeast.

A day after schools in a dozen states closed and Alabama was colder than Alaska, temperatures in the South climbed into the 40s, thawing water fountains and pipes. Parts of the Northeast, however, persisted with temperatures barely in the teens.

In Boston, the Pine Street Inn shelter sent vans to look for the homeless during the day, rather than just at night, said shelter spokeswoman Barbara Trevisan. The shelter also expanded its hours and is serving an extra meal.

“From what I’m hearing, it’s the coldest it’s been in a number of years,” she said.

Trevisan said the shelter, which holds about 700 people, has been packed in recent nights. Boston’s low early Saturday was eight degrees, and temperatures hovered near zero elsewhere in the state.

The weather led to at least seven deaths. In northeast Ohio, authorities said an 8-year-old boy drowned Friday after he fell into a partially frozen creek and got stuck under the ice. Temperatures had reached several degrees below zero in the town of Mentor, Ohio.

Near Pittsburgh, the frozen body of a man was found outside his home at midday Friday. The cause of death was not immediately determined.

Subzero temperatures of 30 below zero in Berlin, N.H., forced firefighters from at least four communities to battle a blaze in shifts Saturday morning. At least two buildings were destroyed, including the local office of U.S. Rep Paul Hodes.

In Illinois, the deep cold that seized the state for two days eased, leaving flooded rivers and frozen waterways in its wake.

The Coast Guard was sending an icebreaking tugboat Saturday evening to Presque Isle Bay in northwestern Pennsylvania to free two ships that got stuck on their way to their winter berths. Thick ice kept the ships from making it into port in Erie.

Temperatures reached the low 30s in central Illinois and the low 20s in the northern part of the state Saturday — balmy compared to the subzero weather that forced people to hide their grimaces behind scarves and ski masks. The National Weather Service said it had been the coldest episode in northern Illinois since February 1996.

At least five tow barges became locked in ice on the lakes near Peoria, said Mike Cox, operations manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers‘ Peoria office. Ice also caused barge traffic to slow along the Illinois River.

In upstate New York, where some communities had dipped below minus 30 during the cold snap, midday temperatures Saturday only reached the mid-teens near the Canadian border. Plattsburgh, N.Y., broke the record low Friday at 24 below.

A team of scientists in the UK is digitally restoring a 2000-year-old painted statue of an Amazon warrior to her original glory.

The scientists are from WMG Solutions at the University of Warwick, the University of Southampton, and the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

The Roman statue was discovered by the Herculaneum Conservation Project in the ancient ruins of Herculaneum, a town preserved in the same eruption that buried nearby Pompeii in AD 79.

It is thought to represent a wounded Amazon warrior, complete with painted hair and eyes preserved by the ash that buried the town.

Researchers from WMG at the University of Warwick, Southampton and Herculaneum are now scanning, modelling and digitally recreating the Amazon statue.

Dr Mark Williams, a leader in laser measurement at WMG, took his team and equipment to the site.

“The statue is an incredible find. Although its age alone makes it valuable, it is unique because it has retained the original painted surface, preserved under the volcanic material that buried Herculaneum,” he said.

Dr Williams used state-of-the-art equipment to accurately measure (within 0.05 of a millimetre) every surface of the bust and translated that information into a computer model.

Dr Greg Gibbons, also of WMG, then used rapid prototyping to create a physical 3D model of the head revealing the smallest detail.

Further recording was carried out on site by experts in archaeological computing from Southampton, led by Dr Graeme Earl.

They used a novel form of photography which provided an extremely detailed record of the texture and colour of the painted surfaces.

The Southampton team is now digitally re-modelling and re-painting the sculpture. They are using techniques derived from the film industry to recreate the original carved and painted surfaces.

In the final step, Professor Alan Chalmers, head of WMG’s visualization team and an expert in ultra-realistic graphics, will apply techniques to the computer model to exactly reproduce the lighting and environmental conditions under which the painted statue would have originally been created and displayed.

This visualization will provide archaeologists with an otherwise impossible view of how the original statue may have looked in context, and allow them to experiment with alternative hypotheses.

According to Professor Chalmers, “Our work will be used both for educational and research purposes to give people new insights into the statue’s design, to provide a record for conservators, and to explore how it may have been appreciated over 2000 years ago.”

Dutch researchers have built a three-dimensional model of a type of virus that causes SARS in a step that could one day help in the battle against the deadly disease.

The model, created using hepatitis coronavirus from mice, will help scientists understand severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which appeared in China in 2002 and killed some 800 people globally before being brought under control.

“I think we can translate what we found for this virus to the SARS virus,” Berend Jan Bosch, a virologist at Utrecht University who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview on Monday.

“If you are going to study the SARS virus you will basically find the same features.”

The researchers reported their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Coronaviruses cause diseases in animals and in people from the common cold to severe gastrointestinal illness. They also cause SARS which scientists believe, like influenza, initially came from an animal.

The 2002 outbreak of SARS is estimated to have cost as much as $100 billion. Quarantine and travel restrictions helped contain the disease.

Bosch and colleagues used a new type of electron microscopy to take images of the virus in a frozen state.

“Because we take so many pictures from different angles, we could combine the images to recreate the virus in 3D,” Bosch said.

The researchers also discovered that the virus’ outer coating or envelope, which it uses to fuse with and spread to healthy cells, is thicker than thought due to an extra internal layer.

Deciphering the structure of the mouse coronavirus is a basic finding but one that can allow researchers to better understand the human form of the virus, Bosch added.

“It is a broader understanding of the architecture of coronaviruses,” he said. “It is really fundamental knowledge.”

Citgo Petroleum Corp, the U.S. arm of Venezuela’s state oil company, has suspended its program to provide free heating oil to hundreds of thousands of low-income U.S. families, the head of the nonprofit organization that distributed the fuel said on Monday.

The Andean nation attributed the move to the sharp drop in the price of oil as well as the spreading world economic crisis, said Joseph Kennedy, chairman of Citizens Energy, which had distributed about $100 million worth of Venezuelan oil for each of the past three years.

“The current economic meltdown has just forced them to reevaluate all the assistance programs that they provide,” Kennedy, a former Congressman and member of a storied U.S. political family, told reporters.

Kennedy said Citgo officials had told him they plan to resume the program in the future, but it is not clear when.

Citgo spokesman Fernando Garay declined comment but said the company would release a statement regarding its heating oil aid programs later Monday.

Houston-based Citgo, with support from Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, said its program benefited as many as 235,000 U.S. families in 23 states.

Chavez, who considers U.S. President George W. Bush his nemesis, widened the heating oil aid program as prices surged in recent years, while accusing the Bush administration of neglecting the U.S. poor. Chavez has described the program as “humanitarian aid,” even though average incomes in the United States are about 10 times those in Venezuela.

Kennedy asked why no U.S. oil companies have stepped up to fill the gap.

“What about U.S. oil companies?” asked Kennedy, the nephew of slain U.S. president John F. Kennedy. “How come I can’t get one barrel of oil from U.S. oil companies?”

The suspension of the heating oil aid would come as easing oil prices make heating oil more affordable for many U.S. families this year — though rising unemployment has given them a new economic worry.

The price of heating oil in the U.S. market fell to an average of $2.33 a gallon during the last week of December, down 7.6 cents a gallon from the previous week and down $1.01 from the same week of 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Venezuela, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, enjoyed surging oil revenues for much of the past five years but has seen that income stream dwindle recently. Oil prices have fallen by around two-thirds since reaching a record of more than $147 a barrel in July.

Citizens Energy said it encouraged U.S. families to write directly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and ask that Citgo continue to provide the U.S. poor with “much-needed” heating oil aid. Meanwhile, Citizens said it would continue its own heating oil assistance programs in Massachusetts, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

The first proper-performance, four-seater electric car from Mitsubishi, a major car manufacturer, which is eco friendly and has zero tailpipe emissions, is all set to be launched on the UK market.

According to a report in The Independent, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV (Mitsubishi innovative Electric Vehicle) could herald a new dawn for electric motoring.

Offering zero emissions from its tailpipe, it is the first crash-tested all-electric four-seat vehicle from a mainstream carmaker that will be available in the UK.

The i-MiEV can fit four 6ft adults plus 246 litres of luggage, and reach a top speed of 87mph.

The battery pack, which makes the car 200 kg heavier than its conventional petrol version, sits under the floor and the 47kW (63bhp) electric motor occupies the space near the rear wheels

It will be available in the UK, initially for leasing, from the middle of 2009 and can travel up to 100 miles without charging.

The i-MiEV marks a dramatic leap forward in quality from the vehicles which have so far dominated the electric car market in the UK.

Developed from Mitsubishi’s petrol-driven i-minicar, the i-MiEV is fully crash-tested, and offers double the speed of its predecessors.

Mitsubishi is convinced there is a serious market for the i-MiEV, in spite of the hefty price tag of 35,000 pounds.

Expensive though it is, there seems little doubt the i-MiEV is showing the way to the future of motoring, as the threat of climate change grows and transport policy increasingly bears down on vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas.

About 200 cars will be available for leasing from selected UK dealers next summer, for about 750 pounds per month.

A team of German and American astronomers have discovered the hottest white dwarf in the Universe, using NASA’s space-based Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE).

Known as white dwarf KPD 0005+5106, it is among the hottest stars ever known with a temperature of 200,000 K at its surface.

It is so hot that its photosphere exhibits emission lines in the ultraviolet spectrum, a phenomenon that has never been seen before.

These emission features stem from extremely ionized calcium (nine-fold ionized, i.e., CaX), which is the highest ionization stage of a chemical element ever discovered in a photospheric stellar spectrum.

Stars of intermediate mass (1-8 solar masses) terminate their life as an Earth-sized white dwarf after the exhaustion of their nuclear fuel. During the transition from a nuclear-burning star to the white dwarf stage, the star becomes very hot.

Many such objects with surface temperatures around 100,000 Kelvin are known.

Theories of stellar evolution predict that the stars can be much hotter. However, the probability of catching them in such an extremely hot state is low, because this phase is rather short-lived.

Since its discovery as a faint blue star in 1985, KPD 0005+5106 attracted much attention because optical spectra taken with ground-based telescopes suggested that this white dwarf is very hot.

In addition, it belongs to a particular class of rare white dwarfs whose atmospheres are dominated by helium.

A detailed analysis of these spectra, combined with ultraviolet observations performed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), had led to the conclusion that KPD 0005+5106 has a temperature of 120,000 Kelvin, which made it the hottest member of its class.

Although theory predicted the existence of such hot white dwarfs, the star nevertheless represents a challenge to the concepts of stellar evolution because of its composition.

The measured calcium abundance (1-10 times the solar value) in combination with the helium-rich nature of its atmosphere represents a chemical surface composition that is not predicted by stellar evolution models.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, just like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe.

M13 is home to over 100,000 stars and located at a distance of 25,000 light-years.

This glittering metropolis of stars in the globular cluster is easily found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules and can even be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

These stars are packed so closely together in a ball, approximately 150 light-years across, that they will spend their entire lives whirling around in the cluster.

Near the core of this cluster, the density of stars is about a hundred times greater than the density in the neighborhood of our sun.

These stars are so crowded that they can, at times, slam into each other and even form a new star, called a “blue straggler.”

The brightest reddish stars in the cluster are ancient red giants. These aging stars have expanded to many times their original diameters and cooled.

The blue-white stars are the hottest in the cluster.

Globular clusters can be found spread largely in a vast halo around our galaxy. M13 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters surrounding our Milky Way galaxy.

Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in the universe. They likely formed before the disk of our Milky Way, so they are older than nearly all other stars in our galaxy.

Studying globular clusters therefore tells us about the history of our galaxy.

With the success of Chandrayaan-1, the country’s first moon mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning a manned space mission as a first step to manned moon mission.

“Sending man to moon is a very complicated mission. So, as a first step, we plan to develop an Indian spacecraft that will take astronauts across the earth and bring them back,” ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair said delivering a lecture on ‘India’s Recent Space Achievements’ here on Sunday.

The government approval for the mission was yet to be received and ISRO was planning the programme by 2015, Nair said.

ISRO was also in the process of developing technologies for a manned moon mission and it would take more than six to seven years to develop those technologies, he said adding our effort is to achieve the milestone by the time the proposed next manned moon mission of USA and China materialise in 2020″.

On the next Space programme of ISRO, Nair said government has accorded sanction for the Chandrayaan-II mission that would be launched in 2012. The work on Chandrayaan-II had started, he said. Under the programme, a robotic lunar rover would smooth land on the moon and conduct experiments, he said.

‘Adithya’, was the another space programme in the pipeline, he said. Under this programme, effort would be made to study the Solar System by launching a satellite and the same would be stationed within the earth orbit, he said.

“There was no plan to send any satellite to Sun,” he said referring to media reports that ISRO was planning a Sun Mission.