Saturn gets star treatment in trio of Hubble movies

Saturn gets star treatment in trio of Hubble movies
14:31 21 March 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Hazel Muir







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From left to right, the moon Tethys (bright dot near rings), the large moon Titan and its shadow appear in this image of Saturn taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (Image: NASA/ESA/E Karkoschka/U Arizona)
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Images of Saturn from the Hubble Space Telescope have been seamlessly woven together into three movies of the majestic planet rotating. Each movie highlights a rare view of the planet during its 30-year waltz around the Sun.
The first movie shows the moons Titan and Tethys orbiting Saturn when the planet's rings were tilted nearly edge-on towards Earth in 1995. This edge-on alignment happens just once every 15 years.
Titan's shadow appears first, followed by Titan itself. Then Tethys appears on the left from behind the planet. The 15-second movie was created from Hubble images taken over 10.5 hours.
The second movie shows Saturn with its rings at maximum tilt towards Earth, which again occurs once every 15 years. The movie zooms in on the banded clouds of the planet's southern hemisphere, where the blue and white spots are giant storms. This 24-second movie was created from Hubble images taken over 24 hours in 2003.
The third and longest movie shows four icy moons circling Saturn in 1995, when the rings were nearly edge-on to us. Enceladus appears first, followed by Mimas and Dione. They all cast shadows onto Saturn. There's a fleeting view of Tethys as it moves behind the planet on the right. This 30-second film was made from Hubble images taken over 9.5 hours.
Hubble only recorded about a dozen images for each event. Astronomers then used software to generate hundreds of "in between" frames to make the movies continuous.

New species of big cat

New species of big cat

The latest in a list of unique inhabitants of Borneo

Clouded leopard in a rainforest. - PHOTO: AFP

KUALA LUMPUR: The clouded leopard of Borneo, discovered to be an entirely new species, is the latest in a growing list of animals and plants unique to the South-East Asian country's rainforest and underscores the need to preserve the area, conservationists said on Thursday.

Genetic tests by researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute revealed that the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra islands is a unique cat species and not the same one found in mainland South-East Asia as long believed, said a statement by WWF, the global conservation organisation.

"Who said a leopard can never change its spots? For over a hundred years we have been looking at this animal and never realised it was unique," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo programme, which is dedicated to preserving the flora and fauna in the deep jungles on Borneo.

The secretive clouded leopards are the biggest predators on Borneo, growing sometimes to the size of a small panther. They have the longest canine teeth relative to body size of any cat.

"The fact that Borneo's top predator is now considered a separate species further emphasises the importance of conserving the Heart of Borneo," Mr. Chapman said.

The news about the clouded leopard comes just a few weeks after a WWF report showed that scientists had identified at least 52 new species of animals and plants over the past year on Borneo, the world's third largest island that is shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.

The Heart of Borneo, a mountainous region covered with equatorial rainforest, is the last great forest home of the Bornean Clouded Leopard. — AP

A slice of Pi

A slice of Pi

SAM JORDISON

TO A CERTAIN type of person, the number 3.14 holds a fascination that can only be equalled by reciting scripts from old episodes of Monty Python or watching repeats of Xena: Warrior Princess. They are the first three digits of pi (p), the key to calculating the circumference and area of every circle. Simply put, it represents the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of any circle, and is one of the most significant numbers in maths. It is also (when it is written in the US fashion) today's date: 3/14.

And that's why maths students at Harvard University are today holding a p recitation contest to see who can list the notoriously long number to the most decimal places. They'll also be holding a pe-eating contest and the naughtier members of the faculty are even threatening to wash those down with some pña colada. Meanwhile, in an attempt to trick their pupils into thinking that maths is fun, teachers all over the world will be bringing pizza p to school and arranging p-themed activities throughout the day. These may or not include the singing of the following beautiful ditty (to the tune of Jingle Bells) written by a teacher and his class in Minnesota especially for the occasion:

Pi day songs

All day long.

Oh, what fun it is,

To sing a jolly pi day song

in a fun math class

like this. (Repeat )

Circles in the snow,

Around and round we go.

How far did we have to run?

Diameter times pi! (Refrain)

I imagine that at this point many of my readers are gagging, if not snorting derisively. Especially since, if you're anything like me, you probably only really know of p as the number that caused you hours of trouble and worry at school when you were instructed to use it to work out the circumference of various circles.

Even now the symbols 2pr send a chill down my spine and until recently I'd never thought to question the importance of all that time spent measuring radii and typing 3.142 into my calculator. The best that I'd have been able to come up with would have been some vague conspiracy theory about keeping Casio and the manufacturers of compasses and protractors in business (and keeping schoolboys like me quiet and unhappy).

I dropped maths as soon as I possibly could, and the vital importance of being able to work with p was lost to me. I hadn't given it any thought for many years. And that's a terrible shame because, as I now know, p really is quite special.

The practical applications of p are, in fact, legion. The number has all kinds of relevances outside the world of square-ruled exercise books and smudged equations, above and beyond the fairly obvious usefulness of being able to accurately work out the circumference of circles in the tunnelling and construction industries. Pi is used in just about every manufacturing process you can think of, from loo rolls to fighter jets. Everywhere there's a circle that needs to be measured, in fact, and that's an awful lot of places, if you think about the number of screws there are in the world (not to mention lenses, tubes and wheels). It's also vital in telecommunications. Radio, TV, telephone and radar signals can all be described as sine waves and p is fundamental in calculating their size and frequency, as it is in calculating the size of the waves in the sea. The magic number is also used in an unutterably complex way to stimulate unknown factors and loading conditions in engineering, wind gusts on a plane, and even random variables in computer-game manufacture.

In short, p is one of the foundation stones of our way of living and we'd be in a lot of trouble without it. It's not overstating things too much to say that the history of our civilisation can be traced in the history of p. Arguably the first technological society, the Babylonians had calculated p using the value of 25/8. It was this level of accuracy that enabled them to produce some of the first serious construction marvels - and to build all those towers that so annoyed the writers of the Old Testament.

Meanwhile, in spite of its claims to be the infallible word of an omnipotent God, the references to p in the Old Testament are distinctly underwhelming. Verses in Kings and II Corinthians about the construction of Solomon's Temple give p a value of "3". Proof at least that the concept had broad currency by the first millennium BC, but nothing like as impressive as the earlier Ancient Egyptian figure of 3.160, written down by a scribe called Ahmes in 1650BC, and which no doubt helped the people of the pharaohs build all those magnificent temples.

The single biggest leap in the evolution of p came, as with so many things, thanks to the ancient Greeks. In the 3rd century BC Archimedes of Syracuse work-ed out the first known theoretical calculation of the number. His idea was that by drawing a polygon outside a circle and then a smaller one inside and calculating the perimeters of both, he'd be able to approximate the circumference of the circle somewhere in between the two figures and thus work his way back to p. This gives a pretty rudimentary value if you draw a four-sided polygon outside and inside the circle, but very accurate when you draw, as Archimedes did, two 96-sided polygons. He worked out the value of p as lying somewhere between 223/71 and 22/7. The average of these two values is roughly 3.1419.

Now, don't worry if you don't completely understand Archimedes's calculations. If I'm being honest, I don't either - which just goes to show how impressive his achievement was. And, just as it took almost two millennia for modern civilisation to catch up with that attained by the ancient Greeks and Romans, it also took almost 2,000 years for Europeans to come up with a better calculation of p. In other words, you aren't alone if you have trouble following the man in the toga. The Indians and Chinese had both produced more accurate approximations by the 15th century AD, but the first modern (ahem) pioneer of Western civilisation was Ludolph van Ceulen, who managed to work the number out to within 35 decimal places. So proud was he of this achievement that he supposedly had them inscribed on his tombstone.

Calculations became steadily more accurate as the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment and, in 1706, a Welshman called William Jones also became the first known person to use the actual symbol "p" when discussing the magic number. He did so in a text with the snappy title Synopsis Palmariorium Mathesios. Unfortunately, he didn't record for posterity the reason he opted for this symbol. The best explanation is that it was a little tribute to Archimedes, being the first letter of the Greek word, perimetron, from peri (around) and metrein (to measure). Nobody really knows, but all the same, the symbol stuck, and calculating it accurately became something of a Holy Grail for eggheads around the world as technology advanced during the Age of Steam.

Rather tragically, one William Shanks devoted the 20 years of his life leading up to 1873 to calculating p to 707 decimal places, only to have a DF Ferguson come along in 1944 and prove that his predecessor had made a mistake. Shanks had got the figure at the 528th decimal place wrong, which meant that all his subsequent figures were also incorrect. Ferguson, of course, had a considerable advantage over the Victorian in that he had a mechanical calculating machine, and the development of computers has been tied up with calculations of p ever since. One of the best ways of testing the power of a new machine is still to see how accurately it can work out p - and they now come up with some huge figures. Just over a year ago Professor Kanada at Tokyo University announced the calculation of p to 1.2411 trillion places. If that number were written down from left to right in the same size typeface as this newsprint, it would be long enough to wrap round the Earth.

The other thing that mathematicians came to realise about p as they calculated it more and more accurately is that it's an irrational number. That's to say, you can't get to the end of it if you try and write it down. There will always be more and more numbers to the right of the decimal point - and it can't be described as a fraction, either. The numerical configuration of p is infinite and so, in a particularly mindbending way, as big as the universe.

All of which goes to prove, I hope, why nerds and mathematicians get so excited about the 14th day of the third month, and why they have adopted it as their own special day of celebration, just as romantics have Valentine's Day, batter-lovers have Pancake Day, and Mums have Mother's Day (don't forget, by the way, it's this Sunday). It's easy to mock those pasty students drinking piña colada, reciting huge numbers to each other and dancing to Don Maclean's American Pie, but when you think about it, they're closer than any of us to understanding one of the secrets of the cosmos. If that isn't cause for celebration, I don't know what is.

THE SECRET LIFE OF p

1 THERE'S some controversy over the exact time celebrations of p day should begin. Some state that 1:59pm is the best time, but those who prefer the 24-hour clock say you should go for 1:59 in the morning as 1:59pm is represented on a 24-hour clock as 15:59.

2 On Kate Bush's double album Aerial, there is a song called p. In it Bush recites the number to its 137th decimal place, inexplicably omitting the 37th and 100th places.

3.1415... The European record for recounting p belongs to Daniel Tammet, who recited the number to its 22,514th digit on 14 March 2004.

4 As well as being p day, 14 March was also the birthday of Albert Einstein.

5 Lars Erickson, a mathematician and composer, has written an entire symphony based on p.

6 Even though computers have worked out a value of p to billions of decimal places, it's very rare that such accuracy is needed. For instance, working out the circumference of the Earth's equator from its radius using only ten decimal places of p produces an error of less than 0.2 millimetres. Not bad, out of 40,075.02 km.

7 Here's p to 50 decimal places: 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510

8 In The Simpsons' episode "Marge in Chains", Apu boasts that he can recite p to 40,000 decimal places. When asked what the 40,000th number is, he answers "one", which is quite correct. Rumour has it that the script writers approached the mathematician David H Bailey in order to get it right.

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=398332007

Last updated: 14-Mar-07 01:34 GMT

musicismylife / 6:22am 14 Mar 2007

It seems my husband, Scaramouche, is STILL being moderated against and his posts disallowed. I'd like to know how he's been so bad compared with some of the posts I've seen on this forum.
Anyway, he's asked me to submit his Ode to Math for the delectation of his public. (silly old f*rt!!)

Flat
Like an angle in a triangle
A plane upon a plane
Euclidian geometry's
Not too hard to explain
Like a pi rolls down a mountain
Or a path upon a sphere
Once you hit that third dimension
It all becomes less clear
Like a tiny 1-D superstring
That's infinitely small
It exists in ten dimensions,
Or is it really there at all?
These are problems that you face
When pondering n-dimensional space

Like a tesseract unfolding
As from nowhere it has grown
We see it coming from a fourth
Dimension of its own
Like a door that keeps revolving
Pushed by Schroedinger's dead cat
Just which three of the ten
Dimensions are we looking at?
Like a theory mutated
On a plane that's rearranged
And topology that's twisted
'Till reality has changed
Can mathematics keep apace
With changing N-dimensional space?

Sets that hold dimensions
Whose dimensions set the sets
If you understand recursion
That's as complex as it gets
Things that by their interactions
And their intersects defined
Does the logical conclusion cause
Implosion of the mind?
Pictures like they were by Dali
Looking really, very odd
In the depths of quantum physics
Do we see the face of God?
When you knew exams were over
Were you suddenly aware
That what you wrote was rubbish
But now you really couldn't care .....

Like a one-dimensional ribbon
Like a thread around a thread
Superstring theory turns
The world upon its head
And it shows a certain grace
Electro-microscopic lace
In N-Dimensional space

*adapted from "Windmills of Your Mind" by Noel Harrison

Musicismylife / 8:44pm 14 Mar 2007

Scaramouche is still not being allowed to post. He's spitting nails!!! Silly old duffer better not have another heart attack, or I'll be at the Scotsman door screaming blue bloody murder!

Anyway, he wants me to point out that it's not a poem it's a SONG. It was featured in the 1968 Steve McQueen movie The Thomas Crown Affair. Director Norman Jewison wanted a song that sounded like The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" for a scene where McQueen's character is flying a glider. The song provided a contrast to the visual ..... McQueen appeared firmly in control, but the music made viewers feel the trepidation going through his mind.
Songwriters Michel Legrand and Marilyn and Alan Bergman wrote it. It took them a while to come up with the title, which they chose because they thought it was interesting.
The song won the 1969 Oscar for Best Song From A Film. It was sung by Noel Harris Harrison, the son of the British actor Rex Harrison. He is best known in the US for co-starring with Stefanie Powers in the popular '60s TV spy series The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.
Dusty Springfield recorded a popular version of this song on her 1969 album Dusty In Memphis.
Edward Woodward also recorded a rather disturbing version of this song on his 1972 album 'The Edward Woodward Album' (now sadly hard to find, but comparable, in places, to William Shatner's 'musical' work from the same period).
Alison Moyet has also recorded this song on her album "Voices". It is very mellow, quite soft-jazzy and being that Alison Moyet has quite a low, husky voice means that like "Only You" from her days with Yazoo.
Noel Harrison's also recorded "A Young Girl" .... originally sung (in French) by Edith Piaf as "Une Enfant".
Jose Feliciano sang the song at the Academy Award show because Harrison was busy making a movie and the director would not let him fly to Hollywood to sing it.
Noel Harrison hosted the TV show Hullabaloo. He had a parking space at MGM next to Natalie Wood. He toured for a while with The Beach Boys and Sonny and Cher.
In the 1970's Harrison fled Hollywood following his stint as Mark Slate on The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. He went to Nova Scotia, grew a bushy beard, and built a house with no electricity. The wood stove caused it to burn to the ground and he had to rebuild it from scratch. To go Back click here.

Life -a matter of choice?

John is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood
and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him
how he was doing, he would reply, "If I were any better, I would be
twins!"

He was a natural motivator.

If an employee was having a bad day, John was there telling the
employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up and
asked him, "I don't get it!

You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?"

He replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, you have two
choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or ... you can choose
to be in a bad mood.

I choose to be in a good mood."

Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or...I can
choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it.

Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept
their complaining or... I can point out the positive side of life. I choose
the positive side of life.

"Yeah, right, it's not that easy," I protested.

"Yes, it is," he said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away
all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to
situations. You choose how people affect your mood.

You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's your
choice how you live your life."

I reflected on what he said. Soon hereafter, I left the Tower Industry
to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him
when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that he was involved in a serious
accident, falling some 60 feet from a communications tower.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, he was released
from the hospital with rods placed in his back.

I saw him about six months after the accident.
When I asked him how he was, he replied, "If I were any better, I'd be
twins...Wanna see my scars?"

I declined to see his wounds, but I did ask him what had gone through
his mind as the accident took place.

"The first thing that went through my mind was the well-being of my
soon-to-be born daughter," he replied. "Then, as I lay on the ground, I
remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or...I could
choose to die. I chose to live."

"Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness?" I asked.

He continued, "..the paramedics were great.

They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me
into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and
nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read 'he's a dead man'. I
knew I needed to take action."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, there was a big burly nurse shouting questions at me," said
John. "She asked if I was allergic to anything. 'Yes, I replied.' The
doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a
deep breath and yelled, 'Gravity'."

Over their laughter, I told them, "I am choosing to live. Operate on me
as if I am alive, not dead."

He lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his
amazing attitude... I learned from him that every day we have the choice
to live fully.

Attitude, after all, is everything.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about
itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Matthew 6:34.

After all today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
Courtesy Orkut

Back- Click here.

Polar bears on climate change frontline

Simon Garfield

The combination of polar bears and melting ice is a heady mix — so much so that the animal's plight has become a rallying cry in the fight against climate change.

— PHOTO: AP

THREATENED: This undated file photo released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows a polar bear resting with her cubs on the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska.

NOT SO long ago polar bears were a symbol of cold, but these days they are a symbol of warmth. In the past few weeks it has become difficult to open a newspaper or website without seeing pictures of the beautiful yellowy-white animals leaping, or lying on sea ice in the Arctic, the newly helpless emblem of climate change. The traditional threats to the polar bear — hunting, toxic waste, offshore drilling — have been overshadowed by a new one: the ice around them is melting, and we are to blame.

This new threat is not new, of course — about as new as deforestation. But two things have put the polar bears on top of the vanishing ice, where they pose unwittingly as the latest poster animals in a distinguished and photogenic parade of endangered pandas, gorillas, dolphins, and whales. At the end of December, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior revealed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was considering adding the polar bear to its list of threatened species. A three-month consultation process began in January, and the world's Arctic specialists have been making appointments to deliver their expertise. This is a more significant addition to the at-risk list than a rare gazelle or panther: it is an admission, after years of denial, of the existence of global warming. The Bush administration could no longer disavow the effects of climate change if one of its departments had acknowledged such visible and dramatic effects. The polar bear had done what environmentalists could not, and opened a window on a global crisis.

Damning verdict

Then, at the beginning of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered its damning verdict on rising temperatures and disappearing sea ice, and polar bears had even more reason to feel loved. Six hundred scientists attempted to dismiss all lingering cynicism about global warming, and to pin the blame on its human perpetrators. The reality is now stark and quantifiable, they stated, and in some areas the devastation is irreversible: we are already too late, for example, to avert the effects of the recent rises in sea levels. This news is particularly bad for polar bears, for the earlier melting of spring ice and the later formation of autumn ice has an immediate impact on their ability to feed. In some areas there is evidence that sea ice breaks up three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago.

Which seems to be good news for polar bear photographers. There is no such thing as an ugly polar bear, and even the less handsome ones appear to have learnt to conceal their claws as they leap the ice floes.

One photograph in particular has captured the imagination. In a neat piece of marketing, the Canadian Ice Service made available a stunning image to coincide with the IPCC report. Two bears, probably a mother and her cub, are pictured on a spectacular ice block off northern Alaska that might have been modelled by Henry Moore. They appear to be howling against injustice. The drama is clear: this is truly the tip of an iceberg, the bears are desperately stranded as the water swells around them. The first thought among viewers is surely one of pity and concern, but this is to misjudge the situation: polar bears are reasonable swimmers, and certainly climbed upon such sculptures centuries before we climbed into our 4x4s.

"Initially I thought the picture was a Photoshop fake," Ian Stirling, senior research scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, emails from his home in Edmonton. "But I have since checked and it is authentic. There is no doubt the photo is used because of its dramatic effect, and it is true it does not represent the kind of sea ice bears normally live on and depend upon for hunting seals."

The photograph was taken in 2004. Naysaying bloggers have used the fact the picture has been romanticised to discredit the claim of bears at risk, and in some cases the very existence of global warming. Several sites link to the original text that accompanied the photograph when it was first used three years ago, in an online journal of the Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project, in which the ice block is described as "extraordinary." The bears were seen during a late-summer arctic drilling mission that found the ice much thicker than expected.

Elsewhere, images of the polar bear are used to further other ends. The World Wildlife Fund features four of them, sketched in Biro, in its latest magazine campaign to `Change the world with a pen,' an attempt to encourage corporate responsibility: "Climate change is no longer a debate," the advertisement says, "it's a business challenge."

"The fate of the polar bear has been on our minds for several years," says Stefan Norris, head of conservation for the WWF International Arctic Programme. "The polar bear is at the very top of the food chain, and is easy to sell, and is an iconic species — but they are just an indication of what's happening to the entire Arctic ecosystem."

Cyclical problem

The polar bear has traditionally been an adaptable creature. But, though it may receive a little sustenance from birds' eggs and from scavenging in rubbish bins, it cannot survive without large supplies of seal meat and blubber, and for its kill it must be on or near sea ice. And the problem is broader still. Polar bears may be feeding on fewer seals not just because of melting sea ice; the seals may be declining because they aren't finding enough fish, and the fish aren't finding sufficient krill, and the krill aren't finding the algae. "Every time we look at this, the urgency becomes greater," Mr. Norris says. "The scientific thinking in 2004 was that there was a significant chance that at the end of the 21st century there would be no sea ice at all at the North Pole during the summer. But at the end of 2006 the U.S. Geological Service came out with a report that this is likely to happen by the middle of this century, in the lifetime of our kids."

How did we get here? There is no agreed date which we can pinpoint as the beginning of our concern for Ursus maritimus. A more civilised approach to their fate began, perhaps, in 1985, when the polar bears disappeared from the London Zoo at the temporary closure of the Mappin Terraces. Animal husbandry matured: Regents Park was no longer considered the ideal habitat for the King of the Arctic. The last polar bear in Britain is a female called Mercedes at Edinburgh Zoo, who looks distinctly forlorn on her website photo.

But we could just as reasonably choose 1993, the year Coca-Cola adopted the animal to spearhead its new global marketing campaign. The Cola Bear reinforced the notion that Coke was best served ice-cold, and it was a drink that spread the love: the bears, who made deep and reassuring guttural noises and never had seal blood on their fur, were represented in family groups playing with penguins and admiring the Aurora Borealis. There was no cuter or more deceptively cuddly anthropomorphism on the tundra — the little ones even wore red scarves — and merchandise followed; keyrings, soft toys, pencil toppers, now quite big on eBay. The only downside for the polar bears was they didn't own their image rights.

That was also the year when Dr. Ian Stirling and Dr. Andrew Derocher, both of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Polar Bear Specialist Group (IUCN PBSG), wrote their first scientific paper on what they perceived as a deterioration in the condition of polar bears in western Hudson Bay, Canada; they also noted unfamiliar patterns in the break-up of ice. Another paper appeared six years later with stronger evidence, and since then similar patterns have been reported in five of the 19 polar bear sub-populations in the Arctic. More young cubs are found dead each year; adults have lost weight, from an average of 650 lb in 1980 to 507 lb in 2004; there have been instances of cannibalism; and in western Hudson Bay the polar bear population decreased from 1,200 in the mid-1990s to less than 1,000 in 2004. There are thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears in the world, and all but one member of the PBSG believe global warming poses a critical threat to their long-term survival.

But as numbers decline, polar tourism flourishes. Companies promise a trip like no other, with buggy tours lasting two days and one evening, "long enough," one brochure states, `for nature enthusiasts to keep their excitement, but not too long to the point of monotony."

The path to preservation has been a slippery one. There have been laws prohibiting excessive hunting since the Seventies, and concern about oil drilling began a decade later, but the case for climate change demanded sterner proof. In 2001, the WWF issued a report called Polar Bears at Risk, but it was speculative. According to Stefan Norris, "We had a little trouble getting the scientists to say, `Yes, there is a one-to-one link here' because there hadn't been long enough statistical studies to link everything together. But we're now seeing direct scientific linkages in Canada, Alaska, Norway, and Russia."

After years of hesitancy, there is now a sense of urgency. On Tuesday night in Washington, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will hold the second of its public hearings on whether the polar bear should be officially regarded as a threatened species. The third and final meeting takes place in Alaska two days later. But it may be too late to be squabbling over semantics. To some extent the fate of the polar bear is already fixed: unless it is able to adapt to spending far greater periods of the year on land, it may not recover from our devastating impact on its Arctic environment.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

Baby's day out

Baby's day out

HARSHAD KARANDIKAR

Falling out of its nest, the baby squirrel had no idea how it could get back.

PHOTO: HARSHAD KARANDIKAR.

OUT OF THE NEST: It's a strange world out there!

I was busy shooting pictures of an interesting gecko, when I heard a `plop' behind me. My friend and I turned around to investigate, and found two tiny squirrel eyes looking intently at us, wondering at the rather dramatic change in scenery.

After getting a few shots of the gecko for identification, we turned our attention to the squirrel. It was a juvenile, with all the colouration of an adult, without the trademark bushy tail. In its place was a skinny one, which made it amply clear that despite its cute looks, it belonged to the rodent family. The squirrel, understandably, was quite afraid of us, and it tried its best to burrow out of sight. After a while it calmed down a bit and decided that we were not going to harm it, after all.

Reunion

It looked quite happy and fine and was in aplayful mood, but its rightful place was its nest, which we had to find. The little fellow's mom had decided that the gap between the tin roof and the walls of a ruined church was a fine little place to raise her brood, what with the tin providing sufficient heating during the cold winter days. This roof, however, was a good 15 feet above the ground, with a flat rock wall leading up to it. Our little fellow didn't yet have the climbing skills of the adults of his species, and our attempts to make him climb the wall were quite unsuccessful.

Then, I had an idea. I took out my tripod, elongated it as much as I could and coaxed him on to the top, and clambered up the wall a few feet. Holding the tripod in one hand, I raised it, and realised happily that it was of perfect height. The little fellow still had no clue about what was going on, and peered down, frightened, from the top. It refused, despite being inches from its nest, to leap across into it. With one hand holding on to the wall, to ensure that I didn't land unceremoniously on to mother earth, I swung the tripod so that it hit the rocky wall with a sharp blow, taking care that the squirrel didn't get hurt in the process. Jolted out of what had begun to look like a nice enough perch, the young squirrel took a smart leap and went straight where we had intended it to - its nest.

The sweet sounds of a squirrel reunion were music to my ears, as I tried to clean off centuries
of dust, which was transferred from the church walls to my clothes, packed up my tripod, and ambled off.

In collaboration with Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group

What can I do?

Locate animal orphanages and rescue centres in your city, and report injured birds and animals to them as soon as possible. You could also make a list of these centres and distribute them in your locality, to increase awareness.