The gullies may extend the history of running water on the surface of Mars Enlarge Image

Mars appears to have had running water on its surface about one million years ago, according to new evidence.

Images from a Nasa spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet show fan-shaped gullies on the surface which seem to be about 1.25 million years old, the study says.

They believe the channels were sculpted by surface water from melting ice.

It may represent the most recent period when water flowed on the planet, a team from Brown University in Rhode Island, US, report in the journal Geology.

Gullies on the Red Planet are known to be young features, but scientists have found it difficult to pin down their precise ages.

You never end up with a pond that you can put goldfish in, but you have transient melt water Samuel Schon, Brown University

But Samuel Schon and colleagues from Brown were able to do this using impact craters on a gully system in Promethei Terra, an area of cratered highlands south of the Martian equator.

“You never end up with a pond that you can put goldfish in,” Mr Schon explained.

“But you have transient melt water. You had ice that typically sublimates. But in these instances it melted, transported, and deposited sediment in the fan. It didn’t last long, but it happened.”

The researchers say the discovery of a gully system, even an isolated one, that supported running water as recently as 1.25 million years ago greatly extends the time that liquid water could have been active on the Red Planet.

It also adds to evidence that Mars experienced a recent ice age in which polar ice is thought to have been transported toward the planet’s equator, where it settled in mid-latitude deposits.

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Separate events

From afar, the gully system looks like one entity several hundred metres wide.

But detailed study of images from Nasa’s Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft shows there were four intervals in which water-borne sediments were carried down the steep slopes of nearby features called alcoves and laid down in a deposit called an alluvial fan.

In order to estimate the age of the system, the scientists used a method of counting craters.

Because impacts occur with some regularity, this has become an established way of dating planetary surfaces. More cratered surfaces are deemed older, while smoother surfaces are considered younger.

Mars may have experienced a recent ice age, researchers say

The researchers accept that because the rate of cratering may shift up and down over time there is a degree of uncertainty in this calculation. But they say this is within acceptable limits.

Mr Schon and his colleagues were able to distinguish four individual “lobe” features which make up the alluvial fan, and determine that each of these lobes must have been deposited in separate events.

One of the lobes was pockmarked with small craters; the scientists identified this as the oldest component of the fan. The other lobes, meanwhile, were unblemished, suggesting they had to be younger.

“We think there was recent water on Mars,” said co-author James Head III, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University.

“This is a big step in the direction to proving that.”

Using a comparison with another cratered surface 80km to the south-west, the team was able to date the oldest lobe of the fan to about 1.25 million years ago.

This established a maximum age for the younger, superimposed lobes.

The researchers suggest the formation developed when ice and snow deposits formed in the alcoves during the most recent ice age on Mars.

About half a million years ago, ice in the mid-latitudes began to melt or, in most instances, changed directly to vapour – a process called sublimation.

The team considered other options, such as groundwater bubbling up to the surface. But they say the most likely mode of formation for the gullies was the melting of snow and ice deposits that created “modest” flows of water.

The finding follows the discovery of water-bearing minerals such as opals and carbonates on Mars.

A bottle discarded at a waste site in the US contains the oldest sample of bomb-grade plutonium made in a nuclear reactor, scientists say.

The sample dates to 1944 and is a relic from the infancy of the US nuclear weapons programme.

A team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used nuclear forensic techniques to date the sample and track down its origins.

Details appear in the latest edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry.

The researchers have described their study as “nuclear archaeology”.

The type of plutonium in the bottle – known as Pu-239 – is a so-called alpha emitter. These alpha particles are too bulky to penetrate skin or paper, but they can cause poisoning if swallowed or inhaled.

It has a half-life (the time it takes for half the radioactive nuclei in a sample to decay) of 24,110 years.

The bottle in question was discovered in a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state, north-western US.

Established as part of the Manhattan Project in 1943, Hanford was home to the world’s first full-scale plutonium production facility.

The Manhattan Project was the US’ bid to build the world’s first nuclear weapon during World War II. The project’s roots lay in fears that Nazi Germany was investigating similar technology.

It culminated in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of the war.

Plutonium produced at the Hanford site was used in Trinity – the world’s first nuclear weapon test – on 16 July 1945 and in the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on 10 August 1945.

To recover bomb-grade plutonium, spent nuclear fuel was transported from a reactor to a chemical re-processing plant.

Here, the small amount of plutonium produced in the reactor was separated from the remaining uranium and waste fission products.

The Hanford site is now the focus of a massive environmental cleanup effort due to high levels of radioactive waste that remain at the site.

Dug up

While excavating a burial trench in December 2004, clean-up personnel discovered a safe which contained a jug filled with whitish liquid slurry.

Further tests revealed the bottle contained a type of plutonium made by re-processing spent fuel in a manner consistent with early operations at Hanford.

Realising the historic potential of the find, Jon Schwantes and colleagues from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory carried out further tests on the sample.

In order to determine its age, the researchers analysed the different forms, or isotopes, of plutonium and uranium in the sample. They found it had been separated from the spent fuel in 1944.

In order to determine which reactor had produced the sample, they compared plutonium isotope ratios from the contents of the bottle against technical data from nuclear research reactors that were operating at the time the sample was made.

Their results strongly suggested the plutonium was manufactured at the prototype X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which began operating in 1943, a year after the Manhattan Project was authorised.

The types of forensic techniques used in the study are also vital for determining the sources, origins and routes of smuggled radioactive materials.

“The frequency of smuggling events involving radioactive materials is supply driven and is on the rise worldwide,” the researchers write in Analytical Chemistry.

They added: “It is likely that (given) the current nuclear renaissance and greater access to these materials by the public, smuggling events involving fissionable materials may rise in the near future.”

A record number of Americans served time in corrections systems across the country in 2007, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Center on the States.

Some of the nation’s most high-profile federal inmates are housed at the Supermax prison in Colorado.

The U.S. correctional population — those in jail, prison, on probation or on parole — totaled 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 adults.

The Pew Center on the States compiled the information from Justice Department and Census Bureau statistics.

America’s prison population has skyrocketed over the past quarter century. In 1982, 1 in 77 adults were in the correctional system in one form or another, totaling 2.2 million people.

The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates, the center said.

The numbers vary widely by race and gender.

“Black adults are four times as likely as whites and nearly 2.5 times as likely as Hispanics to be under correctional control. One in 11 black adults — 9.2 percent — was under correctional supervision at year-end 2007,” the report said. “And although the number of female offenders continues to grow, men of all races are under correctional control at a rate five times that of women.”

There are also wide differences depending on the state. Georgia tops the nation, with 1 in 13 adults in the state’s corrections system, while in New Hampshire the figure is 1 in 88. Southern states tended to have higher rates, with Plains and rural Northeastern states coming in lower.

“State policy choices are responsible for creating this mess and state policy choices can get us out,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project for the Pew Center on the States. “There are two things, and two things only that determine the size and cost of the prison system.”

Dealing out longer sentences and putting more people behind bars have been the hallmarks of Southern states, he said.

America’s record prison population has had a huge budgetary effect, according to the report, with increased corrections spending outstripping everything at the state level except for Medicaid.

Gelb said prison costs 22 times more than community-based corrections.

“If you talk to judges and prosecutors practically anywhere in this country, they will tell you if they had stronger community corrections, they wouldn’t have to send so many people [to prison] for so many low-level offenses,” he said.

For California, it has meant overcrowded prisons. In February, federal judges tentatively ruled that California must reduce the number of inmates in its prison system by up to 40 percent to stop a constitutional violation of prisoners’ rights.

Implementing the court’s ruling would result in up to 58,000 prisoners being released, said Matthew Cate, California’s corrections and rehabilitation secretary, describing it as a threat to public safety.

The Pew Center on the States, through its Public Safety Performance Project, says it promotes “fiscally sound, data-driven policies and practices in sentencing and corrections that protect public safety, hold offenders accountable, and control corrections costs.”

US shares fall below 7,000 level to 12-year low

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The global rout in global stocks spread to the US market today, sending America’s blue chip index plunging below the 7,000-mark for the first time since April 1997.

As Gordon Brown, Britain’s Prime Minister, headed to Washington for talks with President Obama to examine ways of lifting the world out of recession, the Dow Jones industrial average touched its lowest level for 12 years and lost 209.71 points, or 3 per cent, to 6,851.37.

In London, the leading FTSE 100 index took a fall of 204.26 points, or 5.2 per cent, to close at 3,625.83, — a six-year low — sparked by fears over the banking sector after HSBC detailed plans to raise £12.5 billion in the largest cash call in UK corporate history. Investors were also continuing to reel over a sharp contraction in the US economy during the final three months of 2008.

HSBC’s cash call dragged other bank shares lower, and sent investors running for cover in Europe, where France’s CAC index lost 4.48 per cent and the DAX in Germany shed 3.25 per cent.
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Concerns over the global financial sector sparked the sale in US shares, after AIG, the US insurance, reported a quarterly loss of $62 billion, the largest in American history, as well as securing a further $30 billion in government funding.

Freddie Mac also announced that it had netted a further funding from the Government, believed to be between $30 billion and $35 billion as it announced that David Moffett, the chief executive drafted in by the Bush administration to oversee the struggling insurance group, was leaving after only five months in charge.

In the UK, aside from fears about HSBC, investors were also anxious about this week’s Bank of England interest rate decision, when borrowing costs are expected to be cut by a further half percentage point to a new low of 0.5 per cent.

It is also widely expected that the Bank will go ahead with plans to begin quantitative easing, which is a method to increase money supply into the British economy.

Darren Winder, equity strategist at Cazenove, the broker, said: “The capital rising from HSBC is obviously a major market issue. But more generally it is the weakness of the US market from Friday that is weighing heavily on the markets.

“The big picture is still one of a profit picture, which is under strong downward pressure and people are finding it very difficult to get comfortable with valuations against that sort of backdrop.”

At the weekend Warren Buffet, the legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, said the economy would remain a “shambles” during 2009 and beyond.

Dow falls below 7,000

U.S. stocks tumble at the open as investors react to massive quarterly loss from AIG and bailout restructuring.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Stocks opened lower Monday morning, with the Dow falling below 7,000 for the first time since October 1997, after American International Group reported a massive quarterly loss and a restructuring of its bailout by the government.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) was down 96 points, or 1.4%, to 6,966 points, 20 minutes after the opening bell. The S&P 500 (SPX) index slid 11 points, or 1.5% to 724 points. The Nasdaq composite (COMP) was down 0.7%.

Both the Dow and S&P are hovering at their lowest levels in about 12 years, as the market remains anxious about the state of the global economy and the world financial system.

“There’s a buyer’s strike right now in the stock market,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Jefferies & Co.

He blamed the decline in futures on “ongoing concerns about the global recession,” noting that the European indexes were down 3% to 4%.

Asian markets closed lower, with Tokyo’s Nikkei down 3.8%.

AIG: AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), whose status as a Dow component may be in jeopardy, reported a worse-than-expected $61.7 billion loss for the fourth quarter of 2008.

The company blamed “severe credit market deterioration,” particularly in mortgaged-back securities, as well as charges from ongoing restructuring activities.

In addition, the insurer and the government announced a restructuring of the $150 billion bailout agreement. Key components included the government’s decision to commit another $30 billion to the firm in exchange for cumulative preferred stock, and an exchange of an existing $40 billion preferred shares stake for shares that more closely resembles common stock.

Shares of AIG were indicated to open up 10 cents at 52 cents, bucking the market-wide plunge.

Dave Rovelli, managing director for Canaccord Adams, said investors were unhappy with the government’s $30 billion “donation” to AIG, because there are no expectations that the government will ever get its money back.

“How is [AIG] going to pay it back?” said Rovelli. “With what? There’s no way in God’s name that [the government] is going to recoup the money they’ve lent them.”

Economy: Before the opening bell, the government released the personal income and spending data for January. Personal income rose 0.4%, beating expectations of a 0.2% decline, according to a consensus of economic opinion from Briefing.com.

Personal spending rose for the first time in seven months, up 0.6%, which was higher than the 0.4% increase expected by Briefing.com consensus.

After the open, the Institute for Supply Management issues in February report on manufacturing. The purchasing managers’ index is expected to have declined to 34 from 35.6 in January, remaining deep in recessionary territory.

Also after the open, a government report on construction spending is expected to show a 1.5% drop in January after a 1.4% swoon in the previous month.

Job cuts: Europe’s leading bank, HSBC (HBC), said Monday that it would cut 6,100 jobs, all of them in the United States. The bank also said it would close most of the branches of its U.S.-based consumer lending businesses, HFC and Beneficial.

In addition, the bank announced a full-year profit of $5.7 billion, down 70% from $19.1 billion in 2007. HSBC stock fell more than 20% in pre-market trading.

Buffett: Investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) reported the worst results in the 44 years he has run the company, and only the second decline in net worth in that time. In his report to shareholders Saturday, Buffett said Berkshire’s net worth fell in 2008 by $11.5 billion.

Oil and money: Oil fell $2.15 to $42.61 in electronic trading. The dollar was lower against the euro and pound, but higher versus the yen. 

AIG has received the biggest US bail-out package

Insurance giant AIG has reported a loss of $61.7bn (£43bn) in the final three months of 2008 – the largest quarterly loss in corporate history.

And the firm will receive an extra $30bn from the US government as part of a revamped rescue package.

AIG has already received $150bn in financial support – the biggest bail-out by far of any US company.

Stock markets slid sharply as AIG’s plight underscored fears about the health of the global financial system.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury said that AIG posed a “systemic risk” to the global financial system.

“The potential cost to the economy and the taxpayer of government inaction would be extremely high,” they said.

“The additional resources will help stabilise the company, and in doing so help to stabilise the financial system.”

As well as insuring households, AIG plays a key role in insuring risk for financial institutions around the world.

The news of AIG’s historic loss comes as HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, seeks to raise £12.5bn ($17.7bn) to strengthen its finances following a 62% fall in annual profit.

Revamp

The revamped rescue package also involves a restructuring of AIG’s operations.

It calls for the Federal Reserve to take stakes in two of AIG’s international units in exchange for reducing AIG’s debt.

The new measures will also effectively cut the interest payments the insurer must pay to the Federal Reserve.

The AIG financial support is about three times greater than that given to Citigroup, which has received $50bn, and Bank of America, which has received $45bn.

Fear of failure

US officials fear that a failure of AIG would be disastrous for both the US and the global economy.

Credit rating agencies, such as Moody’s, Fitch and Standard & Poor’s, had been poised to cut AIG’s credit ratings as a result of the record loss.

That could have forced AIG to default on its debt, which would have had a knock-on effect on all of AIG’s businesses.

AIG provides insurance protection to individuals, small firms, municipalities, personal pension plans and major US listed companies.

It also insures major financial institutions against complex deals going wrong through derivative contracts such as credit default swaps – the main cause of its problems.

The company first received financial assistance from the state in September in the wake of Lehman Brother’s collapse.

In the UK, AIG is best known as a sponsor of Manchester United, but the deal is due to come to an end.

It also underwrites insurance sold by a number of High Street names including Boots and Argos.