Severe weather forces campaigners to give up their perilous position on British-owned rig off the coast of Greenland

• Greenpeace 'shuts down' Arctic oil rig

Four Greenpeace activists who halted drilling by a British-owned oil exploration rig off Greenland have been arrested after they abandoned their occupation because of severe weather.

Greenlandic police arrested the four after high winds buffeted the Stena Don drilling rig overnight, forcing them to abandon mountaineering-style platforms they had suspended by ropes underneath the platform less than 48 hours earlier.

Morten Nielsen, deputy head of Greenland police, said the four men were rescued between 8pm and midnight local time last night using baskets and ropes lowered from the Stena Don's deck after severe winds and waves up to 6m (18ft) battered the platform.

He said it took about four hours to retrieve the protesters, who have now been arrested under Greenlandic regulations for breaching the 500m safety zone around the rig and under Danish criminal law for trespass.

"Basically we were readying ourselves for any eventuality but it worked out, what needed to be done was a rescue operation," said Nielsen.

He also revealed that the police seized Greenpeace's helicopter, which had flown from its protest ship the Esperanza to photograph the rig and Cairn's operations to stop nearby icebergs, yesterday in the town of Qertarsuaq.

He said the helicopter had been impounded as evidence, and also to ensure Greenpeace paid any fines or liabilities for its protests in Baffin Bay, which began 11 days ago. The four protesters will make their first court appearance in about 24 hours, after being transferred from the rig to the town of Aasiaat. The four could also be deported, instead of being prosecuted.

The activists' retreat is a setback for Greenpeace, which believed a longer-term occupation of the rig would be a serious blow to attempts by the Edinburgh-based exploration firm Cairn Energy to strike oil or gas before the intense Arctic winter sets in.

However, sources in the region had predicted when the four protesters clambered on to the platform at dawn on Tuesday that severe weather forecast for early this morning would cut short their occupation.

Greenpeace has warned that if Cairn strikes oil or gas, it will provoke an "oil rush" in the vulnerable and unspoilt waters of the Arctic as the world's largest oil firms exploit one of the world's largest untapped reserves.

Cairn Energy said drilling had resumed as soon as the four were arrested. Industry experts had denied the campaigners' claims that a delay of four or five days would have seriously damaged the drilling operation; the company had built delays and unscheduled stoppages into its schedule.

The four are now expected to be prosecuted by Greenlandic police, but Greenpeace said said it would now widen its campaign against deep sea drilling by taking the British government to court.

The group has sent the government a "letter before action", accusing ministers of issuing new licenses for deep sea drilling in British waters before they had found out exactly what caused the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

John Sauven, Greenpeace UK's executive director, said: "Our climbers have stopped this rig from drilling in the fragile Arctic for two days, and this is just the start of a long campaign. The world needs to go beyond oil, but here in the UK the government is waving through applications for new drilling as if the Deepwater Horizon explosion never happened.

"The Gulf of Mexico disaster was a game changer, so ministers should suspend new deep water licences and companies like Cairn Energy must stop dangerous drilling in the Arctic and start investing in clean alternatives instead."

In response to this facile Guardian poll which asked "Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?", Alice Bell said "My problem with [the] Guardian poll isn't that it asks people's reactions to science, it's that it trivialises & reduces them."

Is that true? What do you think? Tell us your opinion on this definitive online poll.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

• Physics, not creator, made Big Bang, new book claims
• Professor had previously referred to 'mind of God'

God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is "not necessary".

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have created out of chaos.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find," he theorises.

"The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph."

Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have risen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe, writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, he said: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–- for then we should know the mind of God."

Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the position.

Stephen Hawking's new book is the biggest science news story of the day. Has he suddenly given up a religious belief, asks Roger Highfield

For centuries scientists routinely straightened the tails of Mosasaur fossils in their reconstructions. But a recent re-examination changed overnight the way they see the sea-going lizards

Brian Switek blogs at brianswitek.com

On 6 April 1821 – a little more than two decades before their countryman Richard Owen would coin the term "Dinosauria" – the English naturalists Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare presented a report on a peculiar group of fossil animals to their fellows in the Geological Society of London. One of the subjects of their paper, the long-necked marine reptile Plesiosaurus, made its academic debut that night, but the others were already familiar to the scholars in attendance. Called Ichthyosaurus, these fossil creatures seemed to have been cobbled together out of equal parts fish and crocodile, and even during this era of pre-evolutionary palaeontology, de la Beche and Conybeare could not help but place Ichthyosaurus in what they believed to be a graded series of forms between fish, the newly discovered Plesiosaurus, and crocodiles.

At the time of their report, de la Beche and Conybeare did not have much to work with. Popular accounts of the marine reptile had made Ichthyosaurus famous, yet a significant portion of its skeleton remained unknown. The tireless efforts of one of the first expert fossil collectors – Mary Anning, of "She sells seashells on the seashore" fame – provided naturalists with more complete specimens, showing the various species of Ichthyosaurus to be crocodile-like reptiles with straight, tapering tails. Restorations remained true to the animal's "fish lizard" moniker, and when Richard Owen examined an Ichthyosaurus with a kink in the distal part of its tail, he came up with a series of scenarios by which the tail of the dead individual may have become bent. (My personal favorite: that part of the tail had become bloated with gas during decomposition and pulled the spinal column out of place.)

But Owen, as well as the various scientists and artists who had reconstructed Ichthyosaurus with a straight tail, was wrong. Exceptionally well-preserved ichthyosaur specimens discovered in the 1890s from Holzmaden, Germany, exhibited dark-coloured "halos" – created by bacteria that ate away at the carcasses as they laid on the bottom of the Jurassic seas – which represented the body shapes of these animals. Not only did Ichthyosaurus have a fleshy dorsal fin, but the downward tailbend was not a pathology – it was a normal feature which supported a large tail in the shape of a crescent moon.

Re-examined in this light, it became clear that even specimens preserved without soft-tissue impressions had vertebrae near the end of their tails that were wider at the top than at the bottom; a sure sign of a downward-kinked tail that supported a large caudal fin.

The image of Ichthyosaurus changed overnight. The piscivorous predator was not a big amphibious lizard with paddles where its hands and feet should be; it was a streamlined, fusiform creature which more closely resembled a shark than any lizard. By the close of the 19th century, the issue was settled, but spectacular specimens continue to change what we thought we knew about prehistoric life.

One such skeleton, found in the middle of Kansas in the 1960s, sat in storage for years, but a re-examination has caused scientists to reconsider what they thought they knew about another marine reptile – a mosasaur called Platecarpus.

Many books and documentaries cast mosasaurs among the many "also-rans" that lived alongside the dinosaurs between 98 and 65 million years ago.

A genus or two – usually Mosasaurus and Tylosaurus – get mentioned now and again, but the larger swath of mosasaur diversity is rarely elucidated. These marine reptiles, which were much more closely related to today's Komodo dragons than any dinosaur, were the fiercest predators of the Cretaceous seas, with many species occupying a range of habitats from near-shore to the open ocean. Most were not streamlined speed hunters like the ichthyosaurs, but instead looked like seagoing lizards; they were ambush predators that propelled themselves out of their hiding places with their long tails.

Among the most common of these marine predators was the species Platecarpus tympaniticus (named by the notorious "bone sharp" Edward Drinker Cope in 1869), and one century after it was first described an unusually complete specimen was collected from the well-known Niobrara Chalk in Kansas – a formation representing a time when a shallow sea covered much of western North America.

Shortly after it was excavated in the 1960s, the Platecarpus skeleton (known as LACM 128319) was stored in the collections at California's Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County. For one reason or another, it sat there, undescribed for decades, but in August of this year a team of palaeontologists led by Johan Lindgren of Sweden's Lund University at long last published a report on the specimen in the journal PLoS One.

Not only did it retain traces of soft tissues – including skin impressions and a reddish residue on its ribs that may be the remnants of its heart or liver – but its tail contained a distinctive set of vertebrae that were wider at the top than at the bottom. Platecarpus, just like Ichthyosaurus, had a downward-kinked tail that probably supported at least a modest tail fin.

Specimen LACM 128319 was not the first mosasaur skeleton to show signs of a tail fluke. In 2007, Lindgren led a different set of colleagues in describing the skeleton of a specialised form of mosasaur found in California called Plotosaurus (a specimen of which has also been found sporting soft-tissue impressions). The end of its tail sported a modified portion of vertebrae that looked extremely similar to the tail arrangement of sharks (just flipped down inside of up).

Along with a streamlined body that was deep from top-to-bottom, Plotosaurus was a mosasaur adapted to cruising in the open ocean – it was a mosasaur built like an ichthyosaur.

The skeleton of Platecarpus was not as specialised for pelagic life as that of Plotosaurus, but the examination of the new specimen shows that it was an intermediate form between the early, lizard-like mosasaurs and the last, highly streamlined types.

What is curious, however, is that the new specimen of Platecarpus represents yet another case of a marine reptile that independently evolved a downward tailbend. Ichthyosaurs did, some seagoing crocodiles (such as Geosaurus) did, and now we know that some mosasaurs did. Putting this in an even wider context, sharks have the same kind of tail, but their spinal column kinks upward and the fleshy part of their tail is below. In marine reptiles it is the other way around – with the spinal column bent downward – and perhaps there is some kind of shared evolutionary constraint, inherited from their last common ancestor, that caused the tails of marine reptiles to consistently bend downward when evolving this kind of propulsion.

As yet, such an evolutionary constraint has not been identified, but if it could be discerned, such a quirk of natural history might help us better appreciate how contingency and constraint shape evolution's grand pattern.

Brian Switek blogs at brianswitek.com

As the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir flew back to Britain from his North Cyprus bolt-hole last week, Sean O'Neill, the crime editor of The Times, scooped Fleet Street by being the only print journalist on the plane. Yet those searching Google for the latest on the breaking story that morning would have found no sign of O'Neill's exclusive – only follow-up stories by rival news organisations such as The Guardian and ITN.

In hindsight, if BP had removed the 5,000-foot-long tangle of riser pipe from its damaged Gulf well in the early days of the spill, a new blowout preventer or cap could have been installed, shutting down the well perhaps within weeks instead of months, according to both the federal incident commander and petroleum engineers.

In his new book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking argues that there is no single theory of reality because there is no single reality

The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh explains in his new book how a Buddhist approach could benefit ecology

• Zen and the art of protecting the planet

There is something extraordinarily child-like about the 84-year-old Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh.

To portray him out of context could make him appear naive and unworldly. It is therefore understandable that he does not like to be interviewed by journalists who have not already spent some time in his presence and meditated with him. Perhaps that is why refused on interview with the Daily Mirror after the paper apparently demanded that the piece be illustrated with a photo of him alongside a group of celebrities.

After having a rare personal audience with him for five days during a retreat in Nottingham which nearly a thousand other people took part in, I have come to recognise that his way of being could be an antidote to our politicised and intellectualised world.

He has an uncanny ability to help clear away the complexities of our lives by reminding us to think about the essence of who we are and offering some simple steps to challenge our habitualised problems and neuroticism.

In recent years, he has turned his full attention to the dangers of climate change and recently published the best-selling book The World We Have – A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology.

He discusses in the book how he sat and consulted with the Buddha for many hours and came away with the recognition that we could be facing the end of our civilisation unless we can achieve a spiritual awakening and change our individual and collective behaviour.

"In my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over a few seeds of grain, unaware that in a few hours they will all be killed," he writes.

Above all else, Thay – as he is known – teaches that the world cannot be changed outside of ourselves. The answer is for each one of us to transform the fear, anger, and despair which we cover-up with over-consumption. If we are filling our bodies and minds with toxins, it is no surprise that the world around us also becomes poisoned.

He also argues that those who put their faith in technology alone to save the planet are bowing to a false god.

Like many other spiritual leaders, he sees the genesis of our pain as coming from our dualistic mindset that sees our connection to god, or Buddha, or spirit as outside ourselves and accessible only after our death. As a result we have developed a strong ego that sees itself as separate and threatened and needs to amass things like wealth to feel strong and protected. But none of these can fill the chasm created by our deep sense of separation.

He condones eco-activism but only if done with the right motives:

"I know ecologists who are not happy in their families. They work hard to improve the environment, partly to escape their own unhappy family lives. If someone is not happy within herself, how can she help the environment?"

"The energy we need is not fear or anger, but the energy of understanding and compassion. There is no need to blame or condemn. Those who are destroying themselves, societies and the planet aren't doing it intentionally. Their pain and loneliness are overwhelming and they want to escape. They need to be helped, not punished. Only understanding and compassion on a collective level can liberate us."

Thay believes that within every person are the seeds of love, compassion and understanding as well as the seeds of anger, hatred and discrimination. Using a gardening metaphor, he says our experience of life depends on which seeds we choose to water.

To help water those positive seeds and create a new global ethic, Thay's Order of Interbeing has distilled the Buddha's teachings on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path into five core principles.

The Five Mindfulness Trainings, updated in the last year to make them relevant to our fast-changing world, are not a set of strict rules but a direction to head in.

Thay explains that in the First Training we vow to cherish all life on Earth and not support any acts of killing. In the Second Training we pledge to practice generosity and not support social injustice and oppression. In the Third Training we make a commitment to behave responsibly in our relationships and not engage in sexual misconduct. The Fourth Training asks us to practice loving speech and deep listening in order to relieve others of suffering. The practice of mindful consumption and mindful eating is the object of the Fifth Mindfulness Training.

While Thay sees following these trainings as a way out of the environmental mess we are in, he is not certain that people are yet ready to change their consumerist way of life.

"Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come," he warns. "Civilisations have been destroyed many times and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different."

A form of water deep within Uranus and Neptune may behave like a liquid and a solid simultaneously, explaining the planets' bizarre magnetic fields

From the Guardian:

Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?

81.3% Yes. I believe in gravity, not divinity
18.7% No. God: Hawking 'not necessary'

Somebody show me the units of divinity, please, as well as a few measurements that show the goodness of fit to theory.

Oh, and show the formula, too.

Read the comments on this post...

Bill Gates adds detail to his call for a research push to expand energy choices without overheating the planet.

Lasers can bring down remote-piloted aircraft – but a new demo shows they can also keep the craft airborne

Has there been a failure by the Metropolitan Police to properly investigate alleged criminal activity by those working for the mainstream media?


This question has been around for a long time, but it looked as if it was to linger until we all forgot about it.


It was a question raised by the circumstances around the prosecution of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire.

It is also the subject of a spirited libel case currently being brought by solicitor Mark Lewis (and click there for relevant links into the PCC "activity" on the matter).

But, until last night, it looked as if the question was not really going anywhere, unless Mark Lewis's case got to a substantive hearing.


However, in a detailed article which must be read by anyone with an interest in police conduct and media activities, the New York Times has revived the question and has sought to substantiate it with supporting material.

Much of this material is from anonymous sources and not open to verification.


The Guardian has picked up the story, though it is focusing on the particular role of Andy Coulson.

(It is a feature of UK political culture that any political problem needs to be personalised before anyone will report it and anyone will want to read it, and so this is one reason why we have staggering wider abuses whilst many get flustered about duckhouses and junior ministerial special advisers.)


Serious allegations always just remain allegations; and so a due process needs to be followed in investigating them: a process fair to those involved, but also a process open to public scrutiny.


As the New York Times allegations go to the relationship between the police and the press, it is not appropriate or possible that it should just be left to their respective supervisory bodies (even if one had any confidence in such bodies).

There instead needs to be an open judicial inquiry, and the Deputy Prime Minister (a Liberal Democrat) and the Home Secretary (a Conservative) should appoint one immediately.

Public confidence in the press and the police is crucial to a modern liberal and democratic society; any without an inquiry into these serious allegations, it is difficult to see how such confidence can exist.



COMMENTS MODERATION

No purely anonymous comments will be published; always use a name for ease of reference by other commenters.

Government warned that physics-based businesses will suffer if public funding of science research is cut in the autumn spending review

Researchers at Columbia University have demonstrated that a layer of plants and earth can cut the rate of heat absorption through the roof of a building in summer by 84%

Green roofs, like the one pictured above, benefit more than just their owners, according to Stuart Gaffin, a researcher at Columbia University. "They are a win-win on so many fronts," he said.

Perhaps the greatest overall benefit of green roofs comes in tackling the "urban heat island" effect, which Gaffin suggests is responsible for two-thirds of New York's localized warming over the last century. The conventional black rooftops that he calls "tar beaches" are major contributors to this phenomenon, absorbing and re-radiating the sun's energy as heat. "We're going to want to cool regional climate down, especially where people are living," Gaffin noted. "So we're going to have to confront the urban heat island effect."

While conventional roofs can reach temperatures of 80 °C at 1.00 p.m. even outside of high summer, green roofs always stay closer to ambient temperatures. "These [conventional roofs] are almost dangerously hot spaces," Gaffin told environmentalresearchweb. "That's a huge heat load that we can get rid of."

Plants in green roofs regulate their temperatures through evapotranspiration. "They evaporate copious amounts of water," Gaffin explained. "That takes a lot of energy and means it's a great way to stay cool." Eliminating extreme temperature cycles allows green roofs to be designed as relatively low maintenance options. They experience less thermal expansion and contraction stress, leading to predictions of at least a doubling of lifespan compared to black roofs.

The urban heat island effect is often used by critics of climate research to suggest that measured temperature rises don't indicate global warming. "Generally the climate research community avoids even using urban weather stations, or attempts to make corrections, because you know that's a warming bias," Gaffin explained.

The Columbia team is considering whether meteorological stations on green roofs might provide improved measurements for urban studies, however – although even this wouldn't enable them to assess climate change. The US National Weather Service recommends placing sensors at least 100 feet from paved or concrete surfaces. "One of the major restrictions says 'don't put them near black asphalt rooftops'," Gaffin explained. "When you put green roofs up, they are like meadows in the sky."

White is another roof colour used to fight both the urban heat island effect and global warming in general, by simply reflecting light back into space. This offers cheaper installation than green roofs, but needs special maintenance to prevent dirt reducing its effectiveness. Together, Gaffin expects green and white to replace black roofs. "I think the way we're going to cool things down in cities is going to be a combination of vegetation and brighter surfaces," Gaffin said. "There's going to be a contribution from both."

With the BBC providing links to the scientific research it reports, will 2010 be the year when science journalists discovered the web link?

It's funny how things can be connected. I was looking up the recipe for Worcestershire sauce last night and ended up idly clicking through Wikipedia. It turns out that the sauce is made from anchovies, which can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, a brain-damaging illness that may have caused thousands of frantic seabirds to invade towns in Californian in 1961; events that may have provided some inspiration for Hitchcock's film The Birds. I found all this because of links.

Links are the foundation of the world wide web. They take us beyond whatever we happened to be looking for, on journeys to places we never even imagined existed. Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each travelling on their own miniature voyages of discovery.

Of all the differences between science blogging and mainstream media reporting of science, one of the most profound is the use of links. Science bloggers often come from a scientific background, and as scientists we were drilled on the need for citations. Any factual statement or assertion you make in a research paper should be backed up with a reference to primary evidence supporting the claim.

It's a habit that translates well into journalism, a profession which, like science, should be concerned with studying the world and reporting its findings on behalf of the public in an open and accountable way.

By providing links to sources (or indeed posting full interview transcripts), journalists can show that they're honest, open and trustworthy and allow the reader to judge whether the interpretation they've presented of someone else's work or words is the correct one.

And links can do much more than that. By embedding links in text, journalists can turn their articles from static descriptions of the world into platforms that open up avenues for exploration and discovery to their audience, tapping into rich veins of knowledge and intrigue to provide the reader with far more value than one journalist could provide on their own.

Links are beautiful, so why are newspaper websites so utterly reluctant to use them? In particular, why do science journalists who write about scientific papers so often fail to provide a link to a copy of the paper in question?

It's an issue that Ben Goldacre raised with the BBC earlier this year, but with apparently little success. As Ben pointed out at the time:

"It's very important that the public are able to get access to information, especially since media reports – for many structural reasons – can be light on information, or even contain errors."

But now the Beeb seems to have relented. It has come to my attention, courtesy of the commenter soveda, that the BBC are – occasionally at least – now adding links to the original research in their articles, for example in the 5th paragraph here.

This is to be congratulated. It's easy to moan when journalists get things wrong, but fair play to the BBC here – they've listened, and they appear to have changed their practice. For that they should be congratulated, and if you give a crap about news outlets linking to research (and if not, why on Earth are you still reading this?) then you should go immediately to their feedback page, and leave a friendly comment.

So will other organs follow the BBC's lead? Unfortunately, the scientific journals themselves are putting barriers in the way of journalists who want to link to the original research, as the science editor of the Times Mark Henderson told me earlier:

"I think it's good practice to provide direct hyperlinks to journal articles where practical, but this isn't always easy to achieve. The main problem is that while some journals (eg Nature) provide such links on their embargoed press releases (or tell you how to work them out using DOI numbers), others do not. It can thus take time you don't have to establish the correct link.

Worse still is that some journals (PNAS is a particular offender) don't have papers available online when an embargo lifts. It is thus impossible to link even to an abstract."

Embargoes themselves are a difficult and controversial subject best left to the likes of Ivan Oransky, but clearly there's a problem with the way that PR officers at some major journals are operating – by failing to support busy journalists, they're failing the public. One simple solution would fix this problem, as Mark suggests:

"I would encourage all press officers dealing with journal articles to include a hyperlink to the paper, that will go live when an embargo lifts, on their press releases as a matter of course."

Let's hope that the BBC's decision will start putting pressure on journals to do just this. But let's not forget the wider problem here. As blogs and mainstream media draw ever closer together – a long-term shift epitomised by my own move to the Guardian – there are opportunities for each to learn from the other. One of the most obvious things that bloggers can teach mainstream media journalists is the proper use of the link. It's not enough for journalists to simply report on the world, they need to let people see it for themselves.

Here is a horrible poster we created for the vaccine clinic!

Win a pair of tickets to a one-off screening on Tuesday 7 September 2010